Tag Archives: Computing

Digital Commonwealth Project at St Paul’s RC Academy

April 27, 2014 Mr Christie 2 Comments

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.

Shooting a group video about second teams

Pupils from St Pauls making the short film

Pupils from St Lukes and St Matthews making the short film

Pupils from St Andrews making the short film

Pupils from St Fergus making the short film

Pupils from St Vincents making the short film

Making a group video about Dundee for our visitors

Pupils recording in Audacity

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Understanding Cinema at St Paul’s RC Academy

April 27, 2014 Mr Christie Leave a comment

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.

Trying to thrash out a decent ending with Sandie's help — Trying to thrash out a decent ending with Sandie’s help

The lads creating a hypnotic tune in Audacity

Filming in the corridor and hoping no one comes out of class and gets in shot!

Abu filming a closeup under Sandie's watchful eye — Abu filming a closeup under Sandie’s watchful eye

Plot ideas for our video

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STEM Gamemaker challenge at St Paul’s RC Academy

April 15, 2014 Mr Christie Leave a comment

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.