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.
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.
Visualisers at St Paul’s Academy
In case you didn’t know, Visualisers or Document Cameras are basically powerful digital cameras on flexible arms which when connected through your computer and a projector allow you to share a magnified image of an object (a page of a text book, 3D model, pupils work etc…) with the class. When connected through the computer you can then annotate the image and/or record video and audio so that you could replay the demonstration at a later date to another class without having to set it all up again. There are a number of different makes and models out there I have been lucky enough to trial the following:
Easi-View Visualiser
Approx. Price £100
Slot for SD Memory card – No
Resolution (Megapixels) – 3MP
Image Capture Area – A4
Zoom – N/A
Remote Control – No
Avermedia CP155
Approx. Price £400
Slot for SD Memory card – No
Resolution (Megapixels) – 3.2MP
Image Capture Area – 330 x 248 mm
Zoom – 8 x Digital
Remote Control – No
Samsung SDP860
Approx. Price £450
Slot for SD Memory card – Yes
Resolution (Megapixels) – 1.39MP
Image Capture Area – 420 x 336mm
Zoom – 6 x Optical 8 x Digital
Remote Control – Yes
Elmo L-12
Approx. Price £600 (including tablet)
Slot for SD Memory card – Yes
Resolution (Megapixels) – 3.4MP
Image Capture Area – 420 x 334 mm (A3 size)
Zoom – 12 x Optical 8 x Digital
Remote Control – Yes
Promethean ActiView 322
Approx. Price £400
Slot for SD Memory card – No
Resolution– XGA (1024 x 768)
Image Capture Area – 350mm x 280MM
Zoom – 6 x Optical 6 x Digital
Remote Control – Yes
Avermedia V355AF
Approx. Price £600
Slot for SD Memory card – Yes
Resolution (Megapixels) – 5MP
Image Capture Area – 400 x 300 mm
Zoom – 5 x Optical 8 x Digital
Remote Control – Yes
In summary for me the most important features are the resolution of the camera, and the capture area if the resolution isn’t good enough then if you are trying to show a page from a text book up on the projector or through AB Tutor onto pupil’s screens then the text will be too fuzzy and illegible. Similarly if the capture area isn’t big enough then you have to keep moving the textbook to show different parts of the page. It is worth noting the two main types of mountings for the visualises, they either come with a goose neck flexible articulated arm which you can bend into any position you like, or the more expensive models have a mechanical arm which although lacking the flexibility to put into any position would seem more robust for a classroom situation.
The easiview camera is in my opinion fine for displaying 3D objects or perhaps doing some stop-frame animation, but as a document camera the image quality was too poor.
I found the other visualisers to be fairly similar in terms of quality and functionality, however my favourite to use and the one I thought had the best overall performance was the Avermedia V355AF. The thing I particularly liked about the V355 was laser positioning guide to help indicate where to place the document/object under the camera.
Two exemplar papers ready underneath visualiser
Zooming in to the relevant question
Two different pupil answer clearly displayed together on screen
Using AB Tutor software answers displayed on all pupil screens in the computing lab,
but also displayed on the multimedia projector.
There are loads of features I haven’t used or talked about in this blog, but to round it off visualisers are a great tool whether it is just to save money on textbooks, to quickly show off a good piece of writing to a class or to show a large class the insides of a computer or other small object.
News 20/01/13
Recently I got to use EL
MOs latest compact visualiser (MO-1 MOBILE VISUAL PRESENTER) and I have found it very easy to use and very practical for the classroom. For more information click here
The MO-1 is tiny, and I can easily put it in my laptop case along with my laptop. The visualiser can be mains powered or just powered through the USB connection which again adds to its convenience. Having used a number of other visualisers I can confidently say for me as a normal class teacher overall it is the best I have used. If you need really high resolution images say for Technical Drawing then perhaps you might need one of the top end models but for everyday use the MO-1 is great.
What have I used it for? The MO-1 is good for showing the whole class an object that is on my desk through my projector and if you are in a computer lab with AB Tutor it can also then be shown on pupils screens at the same time. When delivering a recent training session on Flipcams I used the visualiser liked to my projector and ABTutor to show people a close up of the camera buttons and screen as I was demonstrating functionality. With my S5/6 Digital Creator class, pupils have used the visualiser with I Can animate to produce Stop Frame animations, the software picked up the visualiser on pupils computers without drivers needing to be installed, and the fact that the camera is fixed makes animating very easy allowing pupils to keep their hands free for animating rather than having to perch a webcam precariously somewhere . The MO-1 has other functionality like the ability to run by itself and store images directly to an SD card but I have not had the need to use this yet. Priced at around £280 the visualiser is more affordable than most of its rivals too and you can get it in different colours if that interests you!
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