Saturday 9 March 2013

Remixing and a Robbery

Here's a look at some of the things we did... This Week In Gifted.

Identifying a Bank Robber

The Wednesday afternoon K - 2 class were taking care of some banking at the Gifted Program Bank of Penticton when it was robbed!  The bank robber made off with an unknown amount of cash and bonds.  Police interviewed witnesses immediately after the robbery to try and ascertain his or her identity.  It was discovered that the robber was a kid; a boy with light brown slightly wavy hair and blue eyes.  There was some disagreement as to the colour of shirt he was wearing.  It was notable that he was wearing shoes (as strangely most of the employees and customers were in their stocking feet.)  Unfortunately the bank robber has not been apprehended yet, but we think his name might be Graham...

After the robbery the class discussed different ways that we identify people and we looked at a sample BC Driver's license and a sample Canadian passport.  Students then worked on designing their own ID card or passport to use with the tunnel in for the Inventors' Workshop.  (The tunnel has a 'scanner' at one end to scan identification documents.)

Designing Our Own Inventions

The morning classes started to work on ideas for their own inventions.  Students will be deciding on an invention, researching whether it already exists, determining what components are needed for the invention, coming up with drawings and/or models of the invention as well as promoting it.  This will be an ongoing project.

Remixing

The Tuesday and Thursday classes discussed what a remix or a mash-up is.  We then did a quick 'Creature Construction' where each student is asked to draw a creature in three parts.  First, each student has a minute to draw a “head” for their creature. They fold the paper over so that the head is hidden, with little prompts for where to continue the drawing. After the head is hidden, they pass the creature to another student.  Next, each student has a minute to draw a “middle” for their creature, using the guides from the head, but without peeking! After the middles are hidden (and
prompts drawn), they pass the creatures on.  Finally, each student has a minute to draw a “bottom” for their creature. Once the creatures are complete, students unfold the papers to see the collaboratively constructed creatures.  The resulting creatures can be pretty funny looking! 

After that warm up activity students went onto the computers to make a Pass-It-On story in Scratch (see this earlier post for a description of Scratch).   Students had 10 minutes to set up a story; choosing a background, characters and adding movement and text.  Just like the 'Creature Construction' they then rotated to another student's story and added on to it.  We rotated one more time.  Through this process students got an opportunity to learn from each other by seeing how different things were programmed in Scratch.   (This lesson activity is adapted from session 7 in the Scratch Curriculum Guide).

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