Month: September 2023

Micro Pets

For the past couple of weeks, we have been working on a micro:bit project in class. This is the first time some of the class have used micro:bits while others are more experienced.
We took the idea of a virtual pet from the makecode site and then extended it in different ways.

We started with the idea of making the pet happy by stroking it’s logo and making it sad by shaking it.

After that the class could extend it in lots of different ways. For the beginners this involved feeding and giving the pet a drink. The more experienced pupils surprised me with the complexity of what they were doing. We had health scores, feeding to keep healthy and avoiding starvation; being sick, with the chance of illness and death and being annoyed when petted too much!

Some of the class were intrigued enough to keep working in their free time and were great at sharing techniques. I was delighted to see a good understanding of variables and repeats shown by some.

Here are a couple of examples, click the play button, ▶️, to see them in action. Be sure to turn on the sound for giggles & squeaks.

My class made micro bit tamagotchi’s if we shook it it had to make a sad face and sound also on logo pressed it had to look happy and make a happy sound. We had to add other things in .

This is what mine does , 

My pet sleeps on button a and b using a led block and repeats it 8 times. 
On button a pressed it eats using a led and repeat block  If you press button b it dies and I also used a led block a repeat block and a on button b pressed block .

Juliet
  • Sleep
  • Be happy if stroked (press logo)
  • Be sad if shaken 
  • Die (wait long enough and don’t feed it)
  • Be sick if fed to much(can be cured using b)
  • Be scared (by making a noise/blowing/filling the red bar 180+)
  • Be fed (using a)
  • Get a health check (A+B)
Nathaniel

September Poems

We have been reading a book called Love that Dog In the book Jack tell of his literacy lessons with Miss Stretchberry. Miss Stretchberry read the class poems and Jack tries to write some. At the start he does not like it.  The Book also tells the story of Jack’s dog.

We have learnt about several different types of poem and tried to write our own.

The First type of poem we learnt about was imagist poems. Imagist poems try to make an image with words. We learnt about Lunes. Lunes have very few words, 11 in total, three in the first line, five in the second and three in the third. We wrote kennings, these are like riddles. We tried our hand at sound poems and shape poems.

We also read the Poem The Table by the Turkish poet Edip Cansever and wrote our own version.

Pupils’ Views

I’ve taken some quotes from the classes e-Portfolios where they reflected on the writing.

I liked writing my poems because you can write random words and the don’t have to make sense and you can write some and they can be as long and as short as you want .

When I was writing this poem I was thinking about a ewe lamb sale that I went to about a week ago. I thought I could think about what I brought back with me from the sale and I thought that could write a table poem about and what we got back from it

I enjoyed writing poems because it let me experience and explore different ways of writing and I enjoys how many things there are in this universe to write about but still it’s so hard to pick just one for a poem, I enjoyed how punctuation doesn’t alway need to be in a poem, how poems don’t need to make sense and how poems can be enjoyed by anyone anywhere at anytime!

I was thinking to make a dog poem and the kind of I’m going to was a Kenning I enjoyed making the poem because you learn something all the time.

I liked writing the something poem because it’s a concrete poem, it was really fun to write with all the different ways you can say the word, normal, with a capital letter, backwards, full stops in between, commas, all capitals with just one word. I also enjoyed some lunes that I was writing because it doesn’t take long.

I enjoyed writing poems because you get freedom to write with rhythm and beat and writing stories you can’t do that and poems don’t need to make sense.

I enjoyed writing poems because they don’t need to make sense and you can play about with the words that you are writing. It’s also fun because there are so many different ways to write poetry and you can learn new ways.

I like writing poetry because of the freedom. It doesn’t have to mean anything it could just be The Apple all over again. I like the amount of stuff that you can do it doesn’t has to be a number of words before the next line.

I liked the onomatopoeia in my poem.

I enjoyed writing poems because you could do anything you’d want with it and do things that isn’t real you also do a lot of punctuation and you get your brain moving then if you really like it you could show your teacher and they will like it to. It is really fun to write poems and my class is lucky we get a teacher that likes poems so we do things about poems almost everyday. That is why I enjoy poems.

Biggies Highlights W/E September 8th

Another fast week. Highlights for us included the progress we had made in the designs for or elastic band vehicles. A few can be seen on the featured image of this post. Hopefully we can get them all finished and run some distance trials soon.

Poetry

The class have really got into writing poetry and I think we will present some to the parents at next weeks coffee morning. We will put them on the blog too.

micro:bits

Working with the micro:bits on creating virtual pets, some of the more experienced pupils really made great efforts. The idea was to build a simple tamagochi type toy. We had instructions for stroking them to happiness and shaking them to an unhappy state. Some pupils started work on give them health, feeding them and even making them sick if they eat too much. This was all independent work. I was delighted to see the use of variables and loops recalled from last session.

Screenshot of micro:bit code for virtual pet.

Highlights Weekending 1 September

Time flies! We have had quite a busy week.

We got started with our micro:bits, homework and more.

We finally finished our class logos:

And the judges came to a decision of which one we will use to represent our class this session:

The new class logo. The world with crossed paint brush & pencils behind. The world is wearing a Banton tie. To big Letters Bs one each side of the tie.

All the logos are displayed on one of our rotating blog headers.

We have also had a couple of sessions in the Makerspace. The class are modifying their basic Elastic Cars to their own design, this work includes a lot of problem solving and re-design, good fun too.

Today we had a ‘meet the teacher’ classroom visit for our parents. The children showed their parents different activities that we do in class and some of their recent work. The pupils were great ambassadors and I am sure the parents enjoyed their visit.

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