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
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.
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
