LAURA BAIN
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Creating games with Ozobot

20/4/2017

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A post shared by Laura Bain (@larubain) on Apr 19, 2017 at 8:52pm PDT

I am super excited by the project the Year 4 students will be working on in their Digital and Design Technologies lessons. For the first part of this term, students will be designing an interactive board game that works with Ozobots. 

Students will create questions with multiple outcomes that the player can select and place an Ozobot on the line to see if they are correct. Our initial lesson was an exploration of examples to see how this might work using Ozobot Colour Codes. This was then followed by a chance for the students to work with a buddy and see if they could create an example themselves. 
Students used directional prompts, line jumps and u-turns to navigate their robots to the correct response and had a blast doing it. I even roped the Year 4 teachers into having a go at it themselves! 
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Following on from today, students will work in teams to design a game from the ground up. They will have to plan questions, responses and the game board design to compliment their theme. I am hoping to celebrate their learning by inviting parents in for an afternoon to play their games with them. Fingers crossed!
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Scheduled Messages on Class Dojo

19/4/2017

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Class Dojo is always adding new features. In the few years I have been using it, I have seen so many great additions including Student Story and School Story. I have 100% teacher uptake at my school and consistently receive happy parent feedback. 

It was great to see the addition of a simple but highly useful addition to the messaging capability of the platform - the ability to schedule messages. This can be done from the messages section of your class view while logged in via a web browser. Messages can be scheduled to all parents or single parents. This feature has not been rolled out to the Messenger App or Class Dojo Apps on IOS yet.

I really like this idea. Too often I will think of a message I need to get out late at night and really don't want to upset parents with late night notifications. Ultimately this leads to me often forgetting to send the message. Now I can schedule them to send at a more appropriate time the next day. Good one, Class Dojo! 
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Diving into Design

18/4/2017

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It's the first day of Term 2 today and what better way is there to kick it off than with a super fun STEAM challenge?

The Year 6 students have an exciting integrated STEAM unit ahead this term where they will be designing  and building their own solar products. This unit is inspired by Solar Buddies, but that will have to wait until another blog...

The design process and design thinking are going to be a large part of our STEAM unit this week and to get the ball rolling I wanted to give the students a practical way to introduce the design process. The activity I set for the class required them to work in small groups to construct a bridge between two chairs that a Sphero robot could safely traverse. This is not an original idea. Pinterest is full of related lesson ideas and it can also be found in the Sphero Lighting Lab lessons.
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Students were provided with a variety of materials including paddle pop sticks, match sticks, fold back clips, pegs, rubber bands and string. A few basic expectations were set regarding the distance their bridge had to span and also that the only place they could use any type of sticky tape or masking tape, was when connecting their construction to the chairs. Students only had twenty minutes to construct their solutions. At the end of the time they tested their designs and recorded their results on their Student Story on Class Dojo.

A post shared by Laura Bain (@larubain) on Apr 19, 2017 at 6:47pm PDT

​I was actually pretty impressed. There were a lot of successful designs in the short time provided and the children had a lot of fun. Following the activity we discussed what happens when we go about designing a solution to a problem. The activity provided a good example for students to base their contributions to the discussion on. Many acknowledged that they talked with their team about the best materials for the project, design requirements, before testing a few different construction ideas. A few identified that time to study real world examples of bridge design would help them to build a better bridge. 

The activity provided me with the opportunity to highlight a couple of key thoughts I felt were important the children leave the lesson with:
1. A failed design is not really a failure. It's part of the design process and provides an opportunity to reflect on the design and improve it.
2. The design process is often improved with collaboration. Working as a team, consulting with specialists and building on shared ideas usually results in even better outcomes and productivity.
​The Design Process we will be using was developed by the Queensland Department of Education and Training for their C2C Units, available to Australian educators via Scootle. I finished the lesson by introducing this and asking the students to imagine the bridges they could create with a little more time and guidance from the Design Process. We will be using this process to frame our unit this term.

What model do you use with students to facilitate the design process? There are some really great models out there. I'd love to hear what others are using. Leave a comment below!
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Technology will never replace great teachers, but technology in the hands of great teachers is transformational  -  George Couros
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