St Paul’s Computing department was lucky to have a visit from Dr Rachel Menzies, a lecturer at Dundee University School of Computing. Dr Menzies worked with the pupils using our programmable Arduino boards. Pupils got to try out wiring up and LEDS and some even got round to programming their own tunes through speakers that they wired up to the boards.
Twinkle Twinkle Getting started
Chris Wilson, Communications Manager, Abertay University
Primary school children across Dundee will learn about video game design from BAFTA-winning artist and designer Sophia George in a new four-month project, Game Changer Dundee.
This is Sophia’s first project after last week releasing Strawberry Thief, the William Morris-inspired iPad game created following her role as the V&A’s first ever Game Designer.
Game Changer Dundee is a partnership between Abertay University’s Outreach and Public Engagement Network and Dundee City Council’s ICT Support team, who have successfully delivered a range of coding and game design education projects.
Sophia will introduce pupils to her inspirations as an artist and game designer, leading practical sessions looking at the links between traditional art and modern video games. She will focus on creating artwork and game ideas on paper – emphasising the importance of traditional art skills to digital industries like video games.
Sophia George said: “Game design is a very complex, creative skill that’s wonderful to introduce to school pupils at a young age. We’ll be looking at how traditional school subjects like art, music and maths are essential to creating games, and focusing on the importance of art and creativity to making games.
“I’m particularly excited to share my influences from my time in the V&A in London, particularly female artists that are often overlooked. Traditional art skills and historic artists are a rich area of inspiration for game designers, and one I’ll be exploring across Dundee’s primary schools.”
Dundee City Council education convener Councillor Stewart Hunter said: “This is a fantastic opportunity for our pupils to explore the creativity behind video games.
“I am sure that they will be inspired by Sophia George and that they will apply this excellent experience to their learning and development.”
Sophia will visit each participating school twice, before and after Christmas, to give the pupils time to create artwork and game ideas to present to her.
Primary schools across Dundee were invited to take part, with over 30 classes from 21 schools participating in Game Changer Dundee.
Sophia is utilising the collaborative tools of the new Glow 365, enabling pupils and teachers to come together to share experiences and exhibit their creative designs in a virtual learning space.
A small group of S1 pupils representing each of the Houses plus a handful of P6/7s from 4 of our feeder primary schools are being trained up as digital reporters by Dugald MacGilp the Secondary Schools Assessment & Development Officer for Eco-Schools & YRE Scotland. Over 4 consecutive Tuesday afternoons Dugald will be delivering training on the use of audio, video, blogging and social media. The aim of the project is to then have confident and skilled pupils who can then record and report on the planned Commonwealth Game events in the schools. There will also be a legacy in that these pupils can then continue to use these skills to help in their Houses/Schools long after the Commonwealth Games have finished. The theme that Dugald would like the pupils to explore as they take part in the project is the idea of supporting a second team. Pupils will pick, research and present information on, another Commonwealth country to raise awareness in Dundee about other countries and to provide information to other countries about life in.
Tuesday 29th April – Pupils came for the second training session and recorded themselves reciting a piece of poetry or a song from their chosen country, Audacity was was used for this purpose and then the file was exported as an mp3 so that it could be shared online. Click here for an example – cari wilde barbados
Tuesday 6th May – Pupils came for the third training session. The aim of this session was to script and film a minute long video on something about Dundee, so that foreign visitors could get a flavour of the city. Pupils used the school flipcams and and recorded themselves and Dugald provided picture backdrops and a saltire for pupils to jazz up their videos with. Click here for an example – St Pauls vid
Tuesday 13th May – Fourth and final session. Dugald showed pupils a comilation of the vidos they made the previous week, and pupils discussed aresa that they might improve. Dugald shared some tips for successful filming and pupils went on to make 2 more bite-sized group videos about their chosen second team and the city of Dundee. Dugald rounded off the session by talking about Twitter, scocial media in general and then showed pupils some positive international feedback he had received regarding tweets that our group had made on https://twitter.com/DigCW2014
Tuesday 25th November 2014 – Young Scot Legacy Event – Our pupils were invited down to The Shore in Dundee to share their experiences of the project with others involved in different aspects of the Commonwealth Games . Pupils got a chance to offer their ideas on how to engage young people over the themed events planned in Scotland over the next four years starting with the Year of Food and Drink in 2015.
A small group of our S1s are lucky enough to be working with the talented local film maker Sandie Jamieson – on a Cinema project. Pupils have been set three tasks of increasing depth and challenge which will culminate in their final piece being premiered at the Edinbugh Film Festival along with pupil films from other schools in the city and across Scotland. The boys have mostly worked on the project at lunchtimes and a few extra periods here and there for filming. Sandie has shown the boys some inspirational excerpts from famous films and introduced them to the finer points of scriptwriting and and filming and has shown remarkable patience with a group of excitable S1 lads with some outlandish ideas.
More information can be found on the main blog here – http://understandingcinema.wordpress.com/ and on St Paul’s own blog here – http://cinemastpaulsrcdundee.wordpress.com/
The videos we have made can be seen on – https://vimeo.com/user24324805/videos
Filming began in earnest last week with a number of scenes ‘in the can’ as they say.
16 pupils from our S1-S4 classes attended the launch event for the STEM Gamemaker challenge at Abertay. The pupils along with teams from other local schools produced initial plans for the game concept, and then explained their initial ideas to the other teams. The event finished with an inspirational speech from Brian Baglow a Scottish Computer Games Ambassador. The event was facilitated by Future Fossils a local games company who then acted as mentors for the teams across the city, visiting schools to help with any issues the teams had and provide some guidance. The teams only had 10 weeks working during lunchtimes, intervals and spare time at home to design, code and promote their idea for a new game.
The pupils had to use a games development tool called Gamemaker, which is produced by the local firm YoYo games, based down on the riverside. The software uses a graphical interface where pupils select objects and attributes and customise them, but at a more advanced level pupils could go underneath this and create their own code using the tool’s programming language GML. One of the main differences between Gamemaker and something like Scratch is its ability to compile and then export the finished product into a variety of different standalone executables which can run on Android, Apple and PC devices. In fact a number of professional use Gamemaker to write Games which can be purchased from places like iTunes.
Gamemaker has a lot of video based tutorials which users can find on Youtube and on the YoYo games website and has a built in sprite editing facility. YoYo games kindly gifted licences for this professional software development tool to all Secondary schools in Dundee as part of the competition.
Daniel and Phil from the local games company Future Fossil came in at lunchtime to see the progress of our Gamemaker teams. The visitors were very impressed by the enthusiasm and creativity shown by the teams.
Our teams finalised their games and submitted them by the deadline, and two of our teams were fortunate to be selected to go forward to the grand final at YoYo games HQ. The pupils then had a week to prepare a pitch for their game which they would deliver to a Dragon’s Den style panel of professionals in YoYo Games boardroom.
Our teams produced business cards, photostories, animated trailers 3D models and display boards in order to sell their games to the panel and after a nail-biting morning of pitches on the day of the final our teams achieved first and second place winning personal licences of the Gamemaker software, a STEM goody bag and Game Design books for the school.
The pupils thoroughly enjoyed the process which combined a huge amount of learning opportunities from the game design and programming side of things to the social, team working and collaboration skills to the literacy and communication side of selling themselves and their idea to a panel of adults. As their teacher I noticed a boost to the pupils self-esteem and confidence as they progressed through the competition and realised just what they could achieve when they worked together.
I’m currently a permanent supply teaching working at St Andrew’s Primary School in a P6 class in Dundee.
I decided to use Kodu as a stimulus to engage my class in technologies and 21st century literacy skills.
Kodu lets kids create games on the PC and XBox via a simple visual programming language.
I used the built in tutorials to give the pupils a brief introduction to Kodu and then allowed them to explore and experiment further. I didn’t have a great knowledge of games design or how to use Kodu prior to this Interdisciplinary Learning project and learnt with the children.
In their IDL folders and through discussions the pupil’s reflected on the skills that they were developing such as creating, evaluting, analysing, applying, understanding and problem solving. The pupils worked in co-operative learning teams to plan, design and evaluate their games.
To make the IDL project more relevant and engaging to the pupils I invited a Dundee Based Games Design company called Future Fossils to work with my class. This provided an understanding of careers and opportunities in game design.The pupils responded very well to this and were very keen and enthusiastic to show off their work and have a real designer test and feedback on their game.
Throughout the IDL project the activities that we engaged in included:
This was one of the most successful IDL projects I have done with a class. I feel that it was very inclusive and the children gained a wealth of skills which they were then able to reflect on.
S3 CfE Scratch Unit
As part of our new S3 course I’ll teach the pupils Scratch using a mixture of written materials and some video tutorials from the Teach ICT website –
http://www.teach-ict.com/programming/scratch/scratch_home.htm.
Before the end of unit assessment where pupils design and implement their own maze game I do a lesson on sensors and let the pupils use the getting started with Pico boards notes – http://www.picocricket.com/pdfs/Getting_Started_With_PicoBoards.pdf
I introduce the board using my visualiser, pointing out the various sensors, then let pupils work away.
I was slightly limited by the fact that I could only cobble together 5 micro USB cables (these do not come with the kits unfortunately) so pupils work with learning partners and share boards between groups. Having said that the pupils respond really well and get stuck in taking the notes and adding extra functionality to the projects.
Next steps…
I found a tutorial on using the pico board as a controller for a driving game using the slider to steer left and right.
http://scratch.mit.edu/tags/view/picoboard
What is Raspberry Pi? The Raspberry Pi (RPi) is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV through an HDMI cable. The latest model B RPi has 2 USB ports to allow you to plug in a mouse and keyboard. It’s basically a miniature PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The Raspberry Pi costs around £40 for the newer model B (which has more RAM, an additional USB port and an Ethernet connection for networking) and can be purchased from places like Amazon . However it is not ready to use straight out of its’ tiny box, you will also need some other essential equipment: SD Memory card to hold the Operating System (OS), applications and data files (RPi uses this instead of a traditional Hard Disk). The card should be at least 2GB. There are instructions on the RPi website regarding how to flash (install) the OS (Linux) and what the latest recommended OS is. You can however buy SD Memory cards with the OS pre-installed for a premium of about £5. Micro USB Mains Power Wall Supply Charger to supply power to the RPi, this is the same as the supply fro many SmartPhones you may have around the home, but again you can buy a recommended one from retailers like Amazon for about £5. Display connection: The RPi can connect to a TV using an HDMI cable (£3), or to a computer with a DVI port using an HDMI to DVi cable (£4). At school I found that none of my monitors as yet have DVI but found that I could get the yellow composite video cable output and connect it to the yellow video input on my Multimedia Media Projector connection plate, no sound and a 640 x 480 resolution but I could then use my projector as the display and share with the class. Ethernet cable to connect to your router at home and thus out onto the internet, or a USB wireless dongle to attempt wireless networking, this however takes up a precious USB port and the power it requires will prevent the RPi from working. Therefore the fifth item you may want to get is: Powered USB hub to extend the functionality of the RPi e.g connect USB memory sticks, cameras etc… Raspberry PI User Guide is a useful little book to get you started but a lot of the info is out on the RPi forums anyway but it is good to have in one place offline. All in all these items may set you back another 340 but the RPi is still a cheap computer. What can the RPi do? Mostly anything a normal PC can. Depending on the OS build you have, your RPi might have the Scartch and Python programming environments installed as well as web browser software. In addition to this, once the RPi is up and running and you have internet access you can download applications like Open Office and GIMP. What can you use it for in school? Some ideas I have are as follows: Talk about environmental issues specifically energy consumption and wastage reductions with the RPi compared to traditional desktops. Physical Computing using add-on boards like the PICO board to add sense to programs written in Scratch. Int 2 –Advanced Higher Computing pupils can be shown an alternative operating system , see another GUI but also practice with a Command Line Interface and see an alternative programming language (Python) in action. Not got the budget or materials for it, but could get to the point that one of these boards is mounted on the back of any new DVI input monitor computing labs to allow pupils to quickly connect the RPi up to use standalone in addition to the main networked desktops.
The following film is a recording of a science show for primary schools presented by Dr Alan Bruce of the University of Abertay to a mixed audience of primary 6 & 7 pupils. It has been developed as a spin out from the popular Tayside Space School and shows a series of fun science (particularly Physics) experiments. It is designed to promote science in a fun and entertaining manner using space and space travel as a means of introducing basic scientific principles such as gravity and electricity and highlighting their importance in our everyday lives.
The following presentation was one of a series of 12 shows enjoyed by more that 800 pupils from across Dundee and Angus during 2012 and the University would like to thank the Institute of Physics in Scotland for providing funding to support the development and delivery of the shows.
Pupils will be shocked, surprised and entertained by the show, but more importantly Alan and the team at Abertay, hope the show will excite and encourage them to take their first steps towards becoming Scotland’s scientists of the future.
Leave a comment if you use the film with pupils e.g. What are their reactions? Will you plan any follow up practical work?
You can contact Alan at A.bruce@abertay.ac.uk and see the video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRTDqf0IyE0&feature=youtu.be
Internet Safety Wikis at Braeview
As part of the S1 CFE Computing course pupils are studying a unit on the Internet, and a topic within that unit is Internet Safety. Pupils watched some short videos on issues like Cyberbullying using the BBC On top of the digital world site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fq2n1) and visited the thinkuknow (http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/11_16/control/), cbbc (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/topics/stay-safe) and kidsmart (http://www.kidsmart.org.uk/) websites. Following on from this the class divided themselves into groups of 2 or 3 people and were given a topic picked at random on which they had to produce an informative Wiki.
The topics they had to choose from were:
The teams then divided up their topic into chunks so that each person had the chance to create a sub page for their wiki. Pupils were shown how to capture, upload and insert images into their wikis and how to create hyperlinks to subpages and other websites.
Finally when the task is finished pupils then peer evaluate another member of their team using traffic lighting and two stars and a wish sheet (shown below). The teams then also peer evaluate another teams wiki using a similar evaluation sheet (again shown below).
This exercise brings in group work, cross curricular themes building on work the pupils have already done in Social Education and develops their technical skills in producing a Wiki for the first time. Obviously Health and Wellbeing outcomes are covered but also numeracy can be slipped in if the teacher talks about file sizes of images and compression e.g. comparing bitmaps with jpegs. In addition Literacy outcomes can be touched on with pupils proof reading their own and other pupils pages and creating their own text.
The wiki can be seen by clicking here. (https://wikis.glowscotland.org.uk/0001444/Internet_Safety_Wiki/1X2)
Teachers can review, edit and comment on pupils wikis in a straighforward manner.
What I’d do differently:
1/ Team dynamics can be a problem with pupils starting off the best of pals week 1 and then falling out by week 3 over artistic differences, I would pick teams more carefully in the future.
2/I would allocate more time to the task as 3 lessons was not enough to allow pupils time to learn the software, get good quality original content in and then evaluate the wikis.
Below are some pictures and captions outlining the lessons:
Front page of wiki
Editing a wiki
To insert a picture it first has to uploaded by clicking attach file button, I found that the Flash uploader worked quicker than the Classic uploader and that it can be hit and miss with a few attempts before the upload actually works and doesn’t just hang, but it worth the wait. Once uploaded or attached you can then insert it using the editor tools and play about with sizing and alignment.
Peer evaluation sheet
Team evaluation sheet
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