ICT – Banton Biggies

Makecode and Makedo Christmas

The tree has maths baubles, made with our maths skills of measuring of length & angles. And micro:bit ones too. To make the micro:bit ones we need to make 2 animations called from functions. This is the first time we have incorporated functions in our micro:bit code. The microbits are controlled via another micro:bit and the radio feature. There are loops and comparisons involved too.

If you press the play button above you will be able to see the different animation by pressing button A or B. Pressing both together should stop the animation.

Screenshot of the code from Robert’s iPad

The tree itself is made with cardboard & makedo.

We had quite a relaxing day today after our Christmas show yesterday afternoon & evening. We did some maths work looking at tessellation and transformation of shapes, first on paper then in Keynote. We used the idea of Stained Glass windows for the keynote¹ and practised our skills in grouping and transforming shapes. We also use images that we are allowed to use legally. We didn’t just grab them from google.

Most of the images have attribution on the image, the other ones used these photos:
Flickr Photo: Aurora by QIAOS license:Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Flickr Photo: Northern Lights In Tromso by B Lucava license:Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

The idea borrowed from Winter Wonderland 2024 – Renfrewshire Apple Regional Training Centre ↩︎

Scissor Action Extender Monsters

We had our first session in the MakerSpace this week. We had to follow some instructions to make a Scissor Action Extender Monster.

After making their monsters the Biggies then made some short green screen movies using their monsters, you can see them at the end of this video:

Although the monsters seem simple and the videos were very short we learn or practises a lot of skills:

Communication, listening to instructions, asking good questions.
Practical Skills
Problem Solving, almost everyone made mistakes!
Digital Skills
- Taking stills and video
- Using the green screen
- Editing videos, adding green screen overlay & audio
- Recording audio
- Using WordPress to add our videos to our e-portfolios
Literacy Skills, we wrote about our learning.

Duck-amation

Today we had the Great Banton Duck Race.

The Great Banton Duck Race

When the Biggies came back to class, rather wet, we worked on some animations in Keynote and exported them to animated gifs.

Scratching with P1-2

On Wednesday the Biggies went to Primary 1-2 to teach them a little about ScratchJr. This is a programming app for younger users. The Biggies have experience with coding with Scratch itself, micro:bits and Arcade.

Both ethe Biggies and the P1-2 workeked really hard and had a ton of fun. Some of the Biggies wrote about it on their e-portfolios so I’ve taken some quotes.

I learnt how to explain to use scrachJr to younger people and also how fun it is to use ScratchJr.I think we all used a few good different skills but I used ICT, problem solving and leadership I think I was good at all the skills I used. I loved working with the wee ones it was really fun I loved there watching the little films they were all so good.
Alex

We did use a lot of our skills to do the project of teaching the p 1/2’s to be able to use JR For p1/2 it can be a bit hard for them but we weren’t long in teaching them how to use scratchJR. We used of our skills to do so we had to use communication and our own ICT skills. And all in all it was a good chance to work with the p1/2 team.
Blair

We had to make a film or a scene it was so fun with the primary 1/2 . One of the primary one was making a car crash or float about in an iceberg it was so FUNNY.
Faith

This week we worked with primary 1/2 on ScratchJr we were teaching them how to move characters and make them say things. I liked working with the little ones and teaching them how to use ScratchJr because it was really fun and whatever they had they were happy with it. I also enjoyed it because Evie was always thinking ahead. I learned that the primary 2s were already really good at ScratchJr and that it wasn’t me teaching Evie it turned into Evie teaching me.
Juliet

More pictures on the Bairn’s Blog.

Starting Scratching

Arcade Fun

Yesterday the class joined in with the Create-a-long session broadcast in Teams by Digital NL and Education Scotland as part of #CSScotland23.

We had a bit of bother with the sound, so had get caught up this morning.

The session showed how to make a simple maze game with Microsoft MakeCode Arcade. The class changed the games a little to have a Christmas theme, we hope to use them at our Christmas Farye.

I was impressed by how easily the class managed to work around any problems. Their experience with micro:bit coding and scratch helped.

After we finished the game we started loading them onto our kitronic arcade devices. This took a bit of patience as our AirDrop has become flaky recently.

A montage of screenshots some makecode arcade games. — Screenshot of the games online

The children have lots of ideas on how to extend the games and are exploring the tutorials to find other ones that we can use. Here are links to some of the games. I’ve not got links of them all yet.

Banton Biggies Podcast Episode 7

One on our podcast the class has just posted a new episode. The first this session.

BBP episode 7

The class worked really hard and independently on creating this.

From scripting when we hard a brilliant literacy session, class showed iron concentration, talking, listening and editing for flow. Working on expression and talking for an audience.

And recording.

to making musical ‘stings’ and editing the audio.

And finally Publishing.

A visit from Balmalloch Digital Leaders

Last week we had a visit from Balmalloch Digital Leaders. These primary seven children help pupils and teachers in Balmalloch with digital learning.

They wanted to learn a bit about how the Biggies have been using their micro:bit. The Biggies helped them through the setting up of their micro:bits with their iPads an we walked through making a Rock, Paper, Sissors game with them, like this:

We also demonstrated our micro:bit voting system. This is nearly working!

It was good fun working with pupils from another school and to share some of our skills.

Thanks to Mrs Grant for the header image in this post. As it was a dress down day you can’t tell which school the pupils come from.

Halloween Image Editing

Before the Halloween party last Friday the Biggies got their photos taken against our green screen (A big bit of green cloth).

Today they remove the background from their pictures. They used Keynote to create a layered image with their picture on a suitable background. They then exported this to a jpeg image.

As well as creativity the class used their ICT skills. They are getting an understanding of layering and cropping, exporting images to a suitable format and beginning to understand using Creative commons images with attribution!

Click through to see the individual images:

Swat boy

Stranger things Halloween 🎃

Doctor of the fleas

Halloween in the upside down 👻

Dog in the field

The nice purple witch 🧙‍♀️

Halloween monsters inc 👻

Very very old man

Micro:bit Halloween Challange

We had our Halloween party on Friday afternoon, hopefully we will post some costume pictures next week. On Friday Morning the Biggies had a microbit coding challenge.

The idea was to make the micro:bit show a face on the pumpkin if one button was pressed, a ghost if the other one was pressed. The next part was to scare the ghost away with a noise.

As you can see from the video the pupils rose to the challenge.

Micro:bit dice

We had a short micro:bit lesson today. In maths everyone is quite enthusiastic about Dice Wars. making dice seemed like a good idea.

Some of the children even learnt how to embed the simulator to show their code on their e-Portfolios. I can borrow a few, with permission, to show you:

Here is Harry’s give it a shake.

And Hollie’s added a wee emoji check

Josh’s dice goes all the way up to 9!

For some of the class this was a bit of micro revision for others it was their first use of decision (if) Blocks.

here is the code Harry used: