Computers from Cardboard

We had a few lighting fast sessions in the Exploration Station last week due to Mrs Lee being sick.  Some of our Year 3 and 4 learners only had a half session each.  They still managed to start some pretty amazing creations with our Makey Makey's, cardboard computers and Google Slide animations.  

Our last year 4 class visiting the space getting on with creating their Makey Makey and Google Slides animations... 

We've now had a visit to the station from all of our year 3 classes.  They focused on creating their own computers and adding a button to them that explained one aspect of staying safe and strong online.  This was a great challenge and we had to dive into the learning pit to get through it.  The learners used a tool called Vocaroo to record their voices and then we connected them to our Makey Makey and their cardboard computers. 

We listened to a story by Linda Luckas from the Hello Ruby series all about a journey into a computer.  This helped us to find out a bit more about the bits inside a computer and what they do.  We were able to use the computer template created for the Hello Ruby series to help us to make sense of some of the new names we had learnt.  

Each learner had to move their Vocaroo recording into their Inquiry folder, this can be extra tricky when you haven't done it before.  Once we had shifted our files we were able to test out our computers with our buttons using a scratch program and a Makey Makey.    It was like magic watching the buttons on our computers causing the tv to talk using our voice! 

Check out some of our recordings about staying safe online..

  

Here are a few photos of our year 3 learners creating their computers and sharing the finished product with us ... 

Glueing, cutting and decorating

It's tough work getting all the pieces in the right place

Concentrating hard on the decoration of our computers - we think they look great!

Making sure we have the right bits inside our computers

Our finished cardboard computers

Sharing our Knowledge with Makey Makey

This week we welcomed another of our fabulous year 4 class to the Exploration Station.  Our focus again has been on building our knowledge and skills to stay safe and strong online.  We used the information we saw on our safe and strong videos to help us to conquer the Tower of Treasure - one of the games in Interland by Google.  

Have you conquered the tower?  You can view the Interland resources for families here 

Photo Credit: Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/key-open-castle-close-close-up-1422810/

Once we had gathered some more knowledge about how to stay safe and strong we used this in our Makey Makey or Google Slides animation projects.  These projects are designed to help others learn about being safe and strong online.

Here's a short video of one of our Makey Makey projects in action...

A Makey Makey is a device that connects our models to our computer and allows us to program our models to do things like - talk when we press a button.  The basic operations of a Makey Makey are explained in this video.  You can also find out lots more about the Makey Makey on their website.

A few students create Google Slide Animations too.  Here are just a few of the ones they started but not quite finished yet... 

We Can Make it!

We welcomed our first year 4 class to the Exploration Station this week for two sessions about staying Safe and Strong online based around our Level 2 SHINE Online curriculum.   This time we looked at creating either a Makey Makey project or a Google Slides animation.  Both of these projects definitely got us sitting in the learning pit as many of our learners had never used either of these tools before.

We started off learning all about staying safe and strong online, we thought this funny song from Hectors world was actually quite useful in getting us thinking about staying safe and strong.  It's been around for a long time so we talked about some things mentioned in the video we might not have to worry about anymore - like virus scanners - we don't need to install these on a Chromebook but we still need them if we're using a Windows or Macintosh/Apple machine.

For more great resources about staying safe and strong online visit our SHINE Online site here.

We didn't quite manage to finish everything on our projects, here a few photos of our process.  We will share our finished creations in our classrooms and maybe on our classroom blogs. 

Here are a few of the animations our Year 4 Learners have started creating... 

Code Club

Many Sunnyhills students enjoy coding so we've setup a code club that runs once a week at lunchtime.  Our current club will run for this term and then we'll look at giving another group of learners a go at code club. 

Our coders are currently using Google CS First to create a few activities and get a few basic skills to use in Scratch.  

We have just signed up for our own CS First accounts and we've been creating our own Google Logo animations in scratch.  Some of us managed to get our logos finished and have received our first CS First certificates.  We get awarded a certificate each time we complete an activity or theme in CS First.  

The Google logo project gave us a few ideas we could use for our animations, many students in our club took their projects home and made them even more amazing.  We created a studio for our projects and will share it via the blog once we've completed them.

Code Club Google Logo Animation - Scratch Studio

In the mean time here's a great project created by Marco.  Can you get the logo to change?  What key/s do you need to use?

Marco's project page can be found here https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/290090045/ 

What's a TeXpert?

At Sunnyhills we have students who are keen to learn more about the technology we have available in our school and want to share their expertise with other students.  These students apply to be TeXperts.  This year we have a great group of year 3 to 6 students who are really keen to learn and share.  We meet every week in the Exploration Station for TeXpert training. 

We have started the year with a few basic skills like creating our own avatars using Google drawings where we honed our skills with shapes, images, fills and gradients as well as order within a Google Drawing.  We're eventually going to use these avatars on our Digital Badging accounts.  

As TeXperts we're also responsible for the Tinker and Maker equipment we have in our library.  This equipment can be used during lunch time and when we visit the library with our class.  We working on a timetable for each of our year 5 & 6 TeXperts to be available to other students in the library at lunchtimes.  Our job is to help anyone that gets stuck and to make sure the equipment is used safely.

One of our 3D Printers

A few of our badges

This week we've also started designing our own TeXpert badges and 3D Printing them.  We have printed a few of our first versions and we'll be looking at how we might refine these over the coming weeks.  Once we're all happy with our designs we'll mount our badges so we can wear them on our uniform and you'll be able to spot Texperts around school. 

Exploring, Thinking and Making a Connection

We are welcoming two year 6 classes into the station this week after their awesome camp adventures.  Continuing with our theme of staying safe and strong online these two classes have been hard at work planning what they're going to create to earn their Level 3 Safe and Strong badge. 

When we're working in the Exploration Station we always start by thinking about our learning and exploring the topic we're working on.  Once we're ready and think we have enough information to start creating we work on a plan.  

We use a Google slide deck to plan, the slide deck is just a place to hold our thoughts - we might have typed our thoughts onto it, created pictures of our plan or we might have drawn our plan on a whiteboard and then taken a photo of it and put it into our slide deck.   This keeps all our planning in one place so we can refer back to it. 

When we have finished our plan the extra awesome bit happens - we get to put it into action.  This is our Making a connection and Share and shine part of our learning pathway.  

Students gathering resources ready to make their Safe and Strong creation