Tangram Puzzles

 The Junior Classes began their lesson looking at Tangram Puzzles.

The objective was looking at decomposition- realising that problems are made up of small bits.  They worked together to make a new pattern using all of the shapes.  The tricky part was getting the shapes back into the square again.  It took lots of resilience and collaboration. 

Virtual Reality and CoSpace

The Senior classes have been working on creating a scene with animals. The Junior school are doing a topic based theme about animals and the rain forest.

Once they had chosen their theme they researched some key facts about animals which they entered as information into their environment.  Adding animation, sound and movement through coding made their spaces interesting and appealing for a young audience to view.

Seeing their spaces come to live through the VR gave them a real buzz to see all of their hard work come to life.

Animation

We have begun to look at animation.  We started off as a whole class and discussed animations we have watched.  After we viewed a short film of Wallace and Gromit we shared what we noticed.

The first step is to create a thaumatrope - we used two pictures opposite each other when we spun them fast the images blended into one another giving the illusion that the bird was in the cage or the fish was in the bowl.

Claymation

Using the camera on their chromebook they set up their stage 

Groups were given the task to make their ball roll, make their snake slither and make their clay grow.

Once they had viewed their work they downloaded the Clap motion app from the google chrome store.

They used a story board to draw their plan for their story.

The juniors used letters and an ipad to animate spelling words.  They started with their names.

BLUE BOTS

I taught several lessons throughout the Junior school.  We looked at how we could use the previous lessons we had covered on algorithm and coding and linked them to using the blue bots.

The children were very excited to watch the bots move after they had programmed to do so.  We worked together as a class first to practise finding the right way to get to certain shapes.
We then worked in pairs to master the step of the bug dance after we had read the story.  We lined all the bots up together to see which ones were able to successfully complete the dance.

The Perfect Square

Student learning outcomes

(LEVEL 1): Students will learn how to:

• break the problem down into a set of precise instructions.
• show the steps in sequence by order in which it happened
• Use directional language such as L<R and is able to draw arrows to support

Algorithm Grid template - the students used pencil and paper to write their arrows

Using a square origami paper the students then went ahead and created their own picture.

(LEVEL 2): Students will learn how to:

• decompose a problem into a set of step-by-step instructions (algorithm)
• create a program in a simple programming environment based on this algorithm 
• test there program, using a simple debugging strategy to fix the errors she finds.

Algorithm Grid template - the older students did theirs on their drives.  Manipulating the arrows by moving them around the right way to show the sequence.

Makey Makey

More Makey Makey

This was a whole day of learnings.  

The object of this lesson was to:  

• get the students familiar with music notes, names and values
• introduce the new Scratch 3.0
• add the new blocks to use makey makey

The outcome of this lesson required the students to:

•  create a code using scratch to a simple song or tune
•  connect a makeymakey to create an instrument to play the sound through