Computational thinking with Marble Runs

On Friday the DLs (and a few honorary DLs for the day) spent the morning working with Adam from Everyone Can Program (http://everyonecanprogram.com/?page_id=226)
Adam brought in lots of his special designed marble run pieces and we tinkered with the pieces to see what we could do. Adam set us some challenges to make us think carefully about how to put the pieces together.
Although we were having fun playing we were actually learning something very important called computational thinking.

Tracey and Rachel were deciding whether to buy one of Adams kits for our school. We said we liked using it and we would like a set. Next time we will show the rest of Year 2 what to do.

Catching up

Although we haven’t blogged recently we were very busy last term.

We have been taking photos around the school which we are slowly making into a tour of the school for our website. We learnt a lot about how to take appropriate photos and how to caption them following our school e-safety rules. We have been using the app called Pronto on our iPads to do this.

A friend of the school called Mark donated 3 digital video cameras to the school just before bonfire night. He set us a challenge to make a film of the first Firework night lantern parade. We practised using the cameras to get a good quality bit of film. The trick is to move slowly.
On the night we filmed the singing in the hall, the parade and the fireworks. Our final challenge was to edit the footage we had. This took quite a long time. The film is now complete and Tracey is going to publish it so everyone can see.

Another job we did was to help Uniservity, who provide our school website. They are making some changes in the new year and they asked us for our opinions on the changes. We liked what they are planning to do so we said so!

Finally Charlie has joined us as a digital leader to replace Leen who left our school.