As a part of our current Inquiry topic ‘Amazing Engineers’ we were given a challenge.
The challenge was:
Biggles our class bear is exhausted! He needs a chair or seat of some kind to rest on. Create a design of your model, collect the materials you’ll need and start making your model.
**** Keep in mind the different ways you can join materials that we have on our class charts!
Here are the final products. When we reflected upon our models we had lots of success and some things to consider for the future. It was great to see so many people choosing a variety of joining techniques to create sturdy, strong and stable models.
Tell us what you think of our models – we’d love your feedback.
We have continued our learning journey with using the 3D printer as a part of our learning. We are using the Maker’s Empire app to create different models. We’ve been experimenting with our design skills to create a variety of different models.
Our first challenge was to design a logo that represented our class – who we are, where we are, our class values.
The second challenge was to design a desk name plate that could also double as a name badge for each student.
Our most recent challenge is to create an a-MAZE-ing maze. This happened to be good timing as Maker’s Empire has announced a maze competition – which we plan to enter.
Here’s a clip to give you some technical tips for creating a maze. We’re using ‘Cogger’ part of the software to design our mazes, after using ‘Shaper’ to create our other models.
We’ve also been coaching our other Year 2 classes so that they can start designing models for their classes too. Then we’ll be working with different classes around our school.
It’s been such an exciting time in the classroom – we love to watch our designs being printed. WE’ve also been investigating how 3D printing is used in real life too -we’ve been quite fascinated to see how 3D printing relates to everyone around the world. Stay tuned for further 3D printing updates and we continue to use printing in a purposeful and creative way.
This term Craigburn Primary School has won 2 3D printers as a part of the Maker’s Empire project in schools in South Australia. We have the smaller printer in our classroom and the printer for larger projects is in our school Library.
The first challenge for our class was to create a design that reflected our class and our values.
Here is our very first print job – Jesse’s 3D design. He made a very detailed design and we all loved seeing it. We can’t wait to see the other designs that our class members come up with.
We’ve been working hard to learn how to use different forms of technology in our daily learning activities. Our school uses iPads in every classroom through embedding them into our daily classroom activities.
We’ve been experimenting with different apps in our learning, such as:
reading online in Daily 5 reading activities with Ziptales and Sunshine Online
Word Wizard for phonological spelling tasks
Chatterpix – a fun way to make pictures tell a message
Popplet – mind mapping tasks
Bee Bots for coding and programming
Book Creator – creating books to show our learning in different areas
Seesaw – to share our learning with our families
Scratch Jnr – coding
Garageband to create original music pieces
Number Pieces – looking at place value of numbers using MAB equipment
Explain Everything – creating presentations about different topics.
We’ve also got a Stickbot kit for green screen filming of stories that we create and a Little Bits kits to see how to create circuits to make wheels turn, lights go on/off, buzzers to buzz, fans to spin and lots more.
We’re about to start using Maker’s Empire to plan, design and create objects that relate to our Inquiry programme. We’ve just started designing and learning how to use the app. Stay tuned for posts about our 3D products.
What’s your favourite form of technology to use and why?
We love to use technology to help us with our learning. We’ve begun using iPads from home (if you have one), as well as the school sets of iPads and we’ve been using Bee Bots, Bee Bot apps and Scratch Jnr. These programs teach us how to problem solve, program, sequence a set of instructions, estimate, collaborate and co-operate – as well as many other skills we need. Plus – it’s lots of fun!
This week we borrowed 10 Little Bits kits and Dot and Dash robots from Adelaide University. We have these amazing resources until the end of term and couldn’t wait to get started with experimenting with them.
The Little Bits have showed us how to use simple magnetic bricks to click them together and then connect to a power source to create a simple circuit. Now that we understand how they work we’re looking forward to using the Little Bits in models that we create.
Dash and Dot are robots that can be programmed using the Blockly app or use the Wonder app to control their movements. Mr Luke, our Deputy Principal, even visited to try and move Dash around the room.
We also used clip on digital microscopes on our iPads. We are exploring Ecosystems as our current Inquiry topic and went outside to explore our grasslands ecosystem. The clip on microscopes were a fantastic way to see living and non living items up close. We could see so much more detail through the microscopes and we took some great photos of them using our camera app.
What are your favourite types of technology to use? How do you use technology to support your learning?
This post is especially for our family members or anyone who would like to post a comment.
In our class at Craigburn Primary School we love to use technology to support our learning. We’ve been learning about ways to work ‘safely’ online. There are some important points we must remember when we’re using technology online. They are:
protecting our personal information
online etiquette
digital footprints
how technology has changed over time
Technology is changing so quickly – here’s a clip to show just some of the changes over the last 30 years.
Just look at how much information is published to the Internet in just 1 minute!
Now that we have students bringing iPads from home to use at school our learning is becoming more exciting by the day!
We use our Interactive Whiteboard everyday (they’re in every classroom and some rooms have Apple TVs) and it’s a great learning tool for us to use.
We have created a Google slide presentation to show the types of technology we love to use – both at home and at school.
We would love to hear about the types of technology that our parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles and family friends have used – maybe even add a picture so we can see what it looks like. Maybe you’ve used a Discman, Walkman, Gameboy handset, electronic typewriter….or something we’ve never heard of! We look forward to hearing from you all.
What forms of technology have you used?
The latest information sessions for Term 2 are about to start – if you would like to attend the introduction course and start our iTunesU course please follow this link.
Today we were very lucky to have 2 special visitors in our classroom.
They were Elliot and Alex from Today’s Future Sound which is a nonprofit teaching music production, media literacy, using as mental health and edu intervention for underserved youth in Bay Area/LA school+community settings. They are from San Francisco in the USA.
Elliot and Alex are visiting Australia at the moment and have worked in many of our capital cities already. They’re visiting Adelaide for a couple of days – working in different schools and with teachers.
We had lots of fun learning lots of exciting new music making skills – we looked at different DJ’s who use different techniques to mix and create their music, YouTube clips showing their music in a variety of dance clips filmed all around the world AND the best part was we created some music with them. The classes were divided into 3 different groups to ‘play’ different parts of the song and then we used their digital equipment to record our own song – an original!
If you’re interested in learning more about what Alex and Elliot do check out:
At Craigburn Primary School we are very lucky to have access to lots of different types of technology to support us in our learning.
In our class we have:
laptops
Apple computers (that we can flip into Windows if needed)
iPads
iPods
iPhones
iPad minis
Interactive Whiteboards
digital cameras
We use these devices for research, publishing our work, communicating with others around the world, downloading music and movies, practising skills and for fun!! We also love our class blog that shares our learning with the whole world!
Lots of our class members have devices and computers at home too – these can help with their school learning and be used for fun too.
When Miss Sporn went to school there were no computers at schools and only 6 electronic typewriters to share with a whole class.
Here is what an electronic typewriter looks like.
Miss Sporn learned to type on a manual typewriter – here’s a picture of one.
There have been huge changes since those days!!!
We’d like to invite our parents, grandparent,family friends to post their comments about how technology has changed for them over time. What did you use as a child or adult compared to now? Perhaps you had turntables, Commodore 64 computers, polaroid cameras or something else – we may need pictures so we can see what they look like.
We’re really looking forward to hearing from you about your experience with technology.
We’d like to say a huge THANK YOU for all of the comments posted on our blog during the first week of Quadblogging. We received comments from all of our Quadblogging buddies schools – a great effort.
Each morning we started by reading comments from our Quadblogging buddies – it was interesting to read the comments and answer any questions they asked.
Here are some of the claymation iStop Motion Movies our class has created.
This is the first time we’ve had a go at trying to tell a narrative story in this format.
After our popcorn and viewing afternoon we reflected upon our movies – the quality of them and ways to improve them. We thought that for a first attempt our movies were pretty good. Each group told a story, we could easily see the characters and how they contributed to the story and the plasticene characters were well made.
We’ve decided to add music to add more interest, we need more screen shots to make our movies longer, we needed larger backgrounds so that we couldn’t see anything but the background (no movement or people in shots) – we think these changes will add far more detail to our stories and make them more interesting.
Here are some of the movies ( we’re having a few technical hiccups publishing some of them onto You Tube ).
Tell us what you thought of our movies. Can you give us any tips or tricks that might help us to improve our movies?
Have you tried claymation before? Did you use iStop Motion to record them
