Wednesday 23 September 2015

Year 8 Science

The Year 8 girls have been studying the properties of Light during Term Three.  To make their knowledge come to life they worked in groups to design and use their understanding of how light travels to complete a project of designing and creating either a periscope or light some rooms in a house.





Although there were some frustrations with the electrical circuit not working as well as we had planned, the girls were able to move through the process to apply their knowledge of light.  Time spent on decorating the houses could have been more wisely allocated to testing the electrical installation of the lights.  The periscope groups had a lot of fun adjusting the mirrors to the exact angles to be able to see more clearly.  The deadline for a completed project always creeps up on you well before you are ready, and this unit of work was constantly under pressure but the girls did well to create a couple of video explaining how they constructed their project and how it worked.



Integration of Art and Maori

During Term Three I had the pleasure of working with both the Art and Maori teachers in combining a unit of work with the Year 6 students.  The brief was to use their knowledge from Maori and Art to produce a pendant or magnet.  Through Maori the girls learnt about the patterns depicted in the wharenui.  They discussed the meaning behind the traditional colours of red, white, black and green and chose their object accordingly.  As students drew their images, they were mindful that these pictures held a story and the design of their fridge magnet of pendant had to represent something of personal meaning to each individual.  Through their art classes, they looked at shapes. They were challenged to identify open and closed, positive and negative spaces on their design and use the same image replicated differently with these concepts.  Finally the design was printed using our 3D printers.  We used an app on the iPad called PrintShop which captured a photo of the girls design. From here we were able to resize and manipulate it before printing it.  Many thanks to Maria and Sue for your combined effort to make this unit of work such a success.



Monday 21 September 2015

Celebrating a term long project in Code Club

In term 3 the Code Club girls were challenged to spend the term making a game using Scratch.  The girls could choose one of three options:

  • they could create a game from scratch (pun not intended)
  • they could continue to build upon a project we had worked on earlier in the year in Code Club
  • they could remix an existing project that they found on Scratch and make it into their own

Setting goals and working to targets, the girls created some wonderful games including (but not limited too) being a cat and having to keep a ball in the air, adventure games where you find hidden treasure and a game in which you make customisable robots. 

In the final week of term 3 we spend a period one afternoon sharing these games with the other Year 4, 5 and 6 girls who all seemed to enjoy giving them a go. After school we had a celebratory afternoon tea with the girls' parents and also gave them a chance to experience the products of a lot of hard work.

Great job Code Clubbers!  I can't wait to see what you create next term.

Jessica showcasing her game

A classroom of gamers!

Lucy shows us the code behind her robot game

The parents get involved too