Interactive Classroom.net – Page 12 – Blog and teaching resources brought to you by the Geeky Computing Teacher AKA @GeekyNicki

Lego Robot Wars

Nicki May 8, 2011 No Comments

I have recently been playing with Microsoft Robotics Studio using the visual programming language to program my Lego Mindstorms robots. The flexibility this offers is fantastic, not only can you use it to control a vast array of different robots but it also acts as an interface for other hardware too, including web cams and Xbox controllers. After reading a very insightful guide over on Channel 9 I managed to create a simple program to control my robot directly using my Xbox controller. The bonuses don’t end there though, if you want to try out your program without having to connect to your robot you can change to simulation mode which brings up a virtual robot and environment on screen to use for testing, this saves a lot of time when it comes to debugging!

From this I have decided to host a Robot Wars competition in school. I have moved my programming club to Thursdays after school to give us more time. The students will have the opportunity to build their robots and learn how to program and control them in real time using Xbox controllers. The technology faculty have agreed to build an arena, so I just need some keen students and some bluetooth adaptors for the netbooks! I’m very much looking forward to this project, I may even attempt to expand to a local primary school too if it all goes well!

If you, too, are interested in trying out the robotics studio, there are some great tutorials to get started available here. There are also some building guides to help the students on the following sites:

A final quick note, I’ve changed the Robot Wars rules slightly to accommodate for my Lego robots so I don’t end up with lots of broken Lego pieces! Instead, the robots will need to hold a ball and the winner will be the first team to knock the ball off of their opponents robot.

Little Ilford Deep Learning Day

Nicki April 13, 2011 No Comments

Yesterday, as part of my Microsoft Evangelist role I was invited to run workshops at Little Ilford School in London with year 10 students as part of their deep learning day, alongside Jan Webb (@janwebb21) and Ray Chambers (@lanky_boi_ray).

The school was very welcoming and I was impressed with the way the day had been organised. Students went to the various workshops in their tutor groups with just half an hour being spent on each activity. Short and snappy sessions worked well as it meant students never spent very long on one particular activity. The idea behind the day was to give students a taster of various ICT tools and software and to look at how ICT could be used in the workplace. Throughout the day they visited the following workshops on a carousel:

Autocollage, Plex and Stamp
Kodu Game Lab
Songsmith
Building PC’s
Think U Know – Internet Safety
BT Work Inspiration
Creating Ringtones
Careers in ICT
Film Trailers
Olympics – CAD design
Social Media
Gaming Corner

All workshops received very positive feedback (I almost wished I wasn’t presenting so I could take a peak at the others!). I ran the Kodu workshop which consisted of a very quick run through of making a simple game – collecting apples and being chased by an enemy, the students then logged on and spent 20 minutes trying out the tutorials and making their own games. The session was well-received by the students and I am sure many of them will be downloading Kodu at home!

As a whole I was so impressed with the day and the positive attitudes of all the students involved, I may have to suggest we do something similar in my own school, I know our students would really appreciate it too!

The New Look!

Nicki March 25, 2011 No Comments

Just a quick post, it has been my intention for some time to merge my blog and website into one entity. I have now finally done it! Now all of my resources and blog posts can be found right here in one place!

Beginning the Year with Bett

Nicki January 15, 2011 No Comments

Upon my arrival at Bett this year my first stop was, as always, the Microsoft stand. The staff here had lots of software to demonstrate and assist with. My main focus here was to listen to the talks scheduled throughout the day. The first being “Innovative Curriculum Delivery” by Alan Enfield from New Line Learning Academy in Maidstone who gave a very polished talk on his new school build and the use of learning plaza’s. One part that particularly stood out for me was some web-based software, by LookRed, which visualises data in Sims and is great for anyone (regardless of ability) to be able extract data in an easy-to-use way.

Here is a video of some of the work LookRed are doing:

Following this I went to the talk on “Classroom Innovation for Free” by Dan Roberts and Stuart Ball. Here they demonstrated some excellent software that can be used in the classroom:

Flash cards – this allows you to make interactive, online flashcards for use in revision.
Autocollage – software that automatically creates a collage from a bank of pictures. I talked about this last year too which you’ll find here.
Math add in – this is software that allows you to express mathematics equations in Word and OneNote
Mouse mischief – Personally I think this looks great! Students can use their own mouse to interact with the teachers PC in order to answer questions on the board. This is an add-in to PowerPoint which allows you to create the interactive element of the interactive quizzes.
Community clips and Innovids – Community clips is software that allows you to create screencasts to record what you are doing on your screen. It embeds nicely into Office or can be used to record specific windows. Innovids are tutorial videos created by teachers to demonstrate various aspects of Microsoft software.
Teachers blog – Microsoft have a fantastic blog which tells you all about their various software and its’ uses within the classroom.

The final talk I went to was Futures run by Mark Stewart and Ray Fleming. In this they discussed the various tools that could be used in the classroom in the not-so-distant future, these included:

Office web apps
Office 365
Windows phone 7 – the main thing I like about this is that you are able to edit your documents with your phone as it incorporates a full version office!
Deepzoom Composer – This demonstration shows how this works better than I could explain!
Photo synth
Chrono zoom – interactive timeline of the world which you can zoom in and out of!
Reading cloud – online reading community for students and educators from one of Microsoft’s partners
Montage – Create an online montage/newspaper of a particular topic. Very easy and straight forward to use, I made this one in less than 5 minutes!

As I continued my journey around the various stands some notable software and tools stood out. Firstly is CrazyTalk Animator, this looks fantastic but I don’t think I can begin to do it justice by just talking about it so here is a video:

Another area I am particularly interested in is the SSAT Digital Leaders scheme, this is a programme witch trains groups of students to become “digital leaders”, these students then use their skills to train and assist staff in using ICT and technology more effectively. You can read more about this on the SSAT website.

A few other notable areas I came across were as follows:

Games-Ed – simulation games for use in the classroom
Young Coder – reasonably priced programming resources for use in the classroom
Odd ‘n’ Izzi – kids travel and educational website
Day Dream Education – lots of interactive resources for all subjects for the IWB and VLE
Bamzonia – simulation where students build up a thriving island by learning about finances and money-management

Well that’s about it for my round-up of Bett 2011, my final highlight being meeting the Twitter bird! Please post comments if you have any questions or additional points to share.

Microsoft Innovative Education Forum

Nicki December 1, 2010 No Comments

I’ve just got back from the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum in Manchester, I arrived on Monday evening to find myself checking into a beautiful room with a spectacular view of the city. Later in the evening I attended a very beneficial TeachMeet, some particular highlights of this for me were:

Dawn’s Games Based Learning with her primary school class, using DS’s and Wii’s to teach various curriculum subjects, more info can be found here and here. Using games in such a positive way in the classroom is certainly of great interest to me and I can really see this as a way to inspire students.
The SSAT Digital Leaders programme – students in school training and supporting staff.
Heathfield Primary school’s fantastic Year 6 blog.

The main event took place on Tuesday and from what I hear there was a great selection of work shops (I didn’t see any of them, though, as I was presenting at my own one!). The workshops running throughout the day were the following:

Taking IT Global by Mandeep Atwal
Outdoor Learning & Technology by David Rogers
From the Cloud to the Classroom by Guy Shearer
Creative use of Technology in the Classroom by Dan Roberts
Office 2010 in the Classroom by Stuart Ball
Creating Games with Kodu by myself!

You can read more about the workshops here.

My Session – Creating Games with Kodu

My session began by looking at what Kodu is and who can use it. I gave a demonstration of how to make a very simple game (despite being simple I still managed to keep losing!). This was basically just a flat world with a tree, a castle and some apples to collect. I then demonstrated how to program a character to collect the apples to score points and finally added an enemy to shoot at the player!

After this, my delegates sampled an example of a starter activity from my scheme of work which involves matching the correct Kodu instructions together to give various commands. They all did very well!

Following this I introduced my website which contains a complete scheme of work for teaching Kodu, this is available on the link below:

>> http://www.interactiveclassroom.net/Kodu.html

I also shared some other online resources which are very useful when teaching with Kodu:

>> www.planetkodu.com

>> http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/kodu

>> http://koduclub.org

Thank you to everyone who attended my workshops, I hope you all enjoyed the session and can take some of the skills back to your classroom. I very much appreciated the positive feedback on Twitter!

Also on Tuesday we were lucky enough to have two fantastic keynote speakers to talk to us, Professor Sugata Mitra famous for his ‘Hole in the wall’ project and Michael Furdyk Co-founder of the young person’s online community, Taking IT Global. Both were excellent and very inspiring. I would certainly like to experiment with some of Sugata’s work where children teach themselves, I strongly believe this will help them become more independent thinkers.

One of my highlights of the event was winning a Microsoft Innovative Teacher award, I didn’t know I would be getting this so was very excited! Just have to make sure I live up to the title now!

To read more about the event visit the Microsoft Blog or check out #ukief10 on Twitter.

Thanks for reading!