Contact james.mclean@aberdeenshire.gov.uk to register the team(s) who will be taking part from your school.
The closing date for registration will be the last working day in January 2020 (this has been extended) for Primary and Secondary schools
Month: November 2016
Where does it fit into the Curriculum?
There is a natural fit into the Technologies Computing Science E’s and O’s
The technologies progression framework from Education Scotland and these can be accessed HERE
Links can also be made to Literacy, Numeracy, Health and Wellbeing and Science outcomes.
Learners will be demonstrating attributes in each of the four capacities, and will be improving on their digital literacy skills.
How to find resources for 2018 final?
Links to resources
There are great tutorial on the SCRATCH site https://scratch.mit.edu/help/videos/
Even SCRATCH resources on the Raspberry Pi site.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/learning/getting-started-with-scratch/
Great resources on the Barefoot computing site http://barefootcas.org.uk
There may be books in your school library, or ask at your local library.
The cluster academy school will have resources, ask for help from senior students, or visit the computing department, if they have one.
SCRATCH is free and can be downloaded to curricular computers, (if it is not installed log a call with Ask Fred). it can also be accessed online.
5Rights site. http://5rightsframework.com
What is the path to the final at RGU?
The final at RGU will have 1 team from each cluster.
- If your school has more than 1 team then there will be a competition in the school between the teams to decide the winning team, this will take place before the Easter Holidays
- The semi finals will take place during May 2017 where a team from each cluster will progress to the grand final at RGU.
- The overall Aberdeenshire GamesCon Champion team will be decided at RGU on 22nd June 2017
The RGU day will allow teams to meet programmers, games developers, students and staff from the RGU computing school. We hope to have representatives from TV and radio to promote the event across Scotland.
Who can compete?
The GamesCon is open to any P6/P7 learners who will work in a team of four.
Each team will typically have a teacher to supervise, and in the team we would suggest a mix of skills:
Graphic designer– someone who will design the characters, backgrounds and foregrounds and any other visual effects, including storyboards
Presenter – someone who will be confident in presenting the project to an audience, he/she may also design posters to demonstrate the work of the team and for the presentation create a Movie/PowerPoint/Prezi to really show off the work of the group.
Programmer – someone who has good coding skills and can bring the ideas and storyboards to life.
Document controller – someone to ensure all the document associated with the project are kept safely, this will include all the ideas, sketches and planning documents, scripts used in coding, testing plans and results. This person may want to create a blog to keep track of the project as it moves from ideas to finished product.
Researcher – someone who will be responsible for researching the ideas and ensuring the finished product is accurate in what it says/aims are.
There may be other roles that the teams will think of, which will mean some team members will be working in more than 1 role.
We would hope that the learners all work as a team, taking a shared responsibility for the finished product and learning from each other.
What is the Competition?
GamesCon is a competition for learners in Primary 6 and 7 and is to focus attention on how to keep children and young people safe online. The learners will work in teams of 4 and with help, (maybe from a teacher or digital leaders in the primary or cluster secondary school) will create a plan for a project that will be implemented in SCRATCH. The final program will be interactive, it could be a game , or animation that will show some aspect of the 5Rights initiative that the learners have researched. Learners will record their progress throughout the competition keeping photos, notes, any research findings, programme design, testing and debugging findings to bring to the GamesCon final.
The GamesCon competition will allow youngsters opportunities for:
- Creativity and problem solving
- Collaboration and contribution
- Developing computational thinking concepts
- Expanding their digital literacy skills
