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