Everyone Can Code - Puzzles

Over the past two weeks, we have begun looking at new Apple resources called Everyone Can Code - Puzzles. Computational thinking and designing and developing digital outcomes is now part of the New Zealand Curriculum, so the learning possibilities of these resources link well with our classroom programme.



Apple say that the lessons were designed not only to teach students fundamental coding concepts using a real language—Swift—but also how code is used all around them. Each lesson requires students to think critically to solve problems and then apply what they learned ​
to a new scenario. Students also complete activities that connect the concept to everyday life. The goal is to deepen their understanding of the role of coding and computer science in the world and also to help them think about how they can apply it to their own lives today and in the future. Throughout each lesson, students express their creativity through code and other projects.

Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language created by Apple that makes programming ​
easier and more flexible. For first-time coders, there’s Swift Playgrounds, an iPad app that makes getting started fun and interactive. By exploring and solving rich puzzle worlds, students develop coding skills that become the foundation of their programming knowledge.

So far, we have been learning about commands. Everyone is showing a high level of interest and engagement in the sessions so far, and today in assembly we were excited to give the rest of our school a sneak peak at what we've been up to. Check out our video below.

Ōtautahi Pizza At The DigiAwards

We were so excited to be presented two awards for our Ōtautahi Pizza website at the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards. In previous posts, you can read a little about the project. But below is an article that Atarau, Milla and Arona wrote for our school newsletter. We had many successes from across our whole school. 

DigiAwards 2019

On Wednesday the 13th of November, the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards hosted an awards evening at St. Margaret's College for the finalists. Bromley School entered many different entries for many different categories. The categories were website, story telling (retelling original stories), coding, comercial, Te Reo, and an open category for any entries. Loads of schools in the Canterbury region entered with their unique creations. The awards were given by companies around Canterbury.

Everyone was greeted by Haeata’s Kapa Haka group and they did some waiata along with a Haka. There were over 700 people who attended. There were also many people from schools who were nominated. The prizes were things like advanced mechanic building sets, coding equipment and Chromebooks.

We are so excited that the overall runner up was Mrs Gardner’s class, Kakano 1. They won a Chromebook! They entered a video called Te Waka O Tamarēreti. The overall winner was a boy from Avonhead called Thomas. He entered a Battle Bots game he coded and created himself.

Bromley School won a number of different categories, which was awesome because it was our first time entering and we won so many awards. Below is a list of our winning entries.

Storytelling Winners (Bromley):
Year 0-2: Te Waka O Tamarēreti from Mrs Gardner's class, Kakano 1.
Year 3-4: The Nine Ika Of Matariki. From Mrs Hix and Mrs Togiaso’s class, Pitau 1.

Storytelling Runner Ups (Bromley)
Year 0-2: Skytins Vs Zombies. From Mrs Wixon and Miss Paterson’s class Kakano 2.

The Open Category Winners:
Year 0-2: The Brave Shadow. From Mrs Macintosh and Miss Newth’s class Kakano 3.

The Open Category Runner Up:
Year 3-4: A Special Place. From Mr Cron and Mrs Sung’s class in Pitau 2.

Website Winners:
Year 5-6: Ōtautahi Pizza. From Mr K’s literacy group in Koru 1.

There was also a special prize given to Ōtautahi Pizza which was a $750 voucher for PB Tech. This was given to them because one of the judges believed that the way we created it and designed it deserves an extra special award.

Throughout the night there was lots of cheering from Bromley. When they announced who was in 2nd, Bromley would start cheering because they noticed that Bromley won. There was lots of support and all the entries had lots of effort put into them. Bromley left St. Margaret’s happy and were even happier about the results.

Here is a link to the Grow Waitaha website for extra info, including the winning entries.
https://www.growwaitaha.co.nz/digiawards/

Ōtautahi Pizza Project - Part Two

We have just completed our Ōtautahi Pizza website and have entered it in the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards under the website category.

The project has taken us most of the term and we have chipped away at it during our literacy sessions. Everyone has contributed in some way, with some individuals having a huge input.

You can read about the project on the website itself. We are really proud of it!

Click here: www.otautahipizza.weebly.com

Ōtautahi Pizza Project - Part One

Mr K's literacy groups have begun a new project. We are creating a website that will contain recipes for pizzas we have made - all named after some of our favourite places in Christchurch.

We hope to enter the website into the Grow Waitaha DigiAwards, which has a theme this year of celebrating innovation in Ōtautahi. Our creation will be submitted in the website category.

To start with, we set up a Trello board that we could use to track parts of the project that we need to do, are currently doing, and have done. It has been a great tool to display where we are at daily. Some of the initial tasks we have been working on are researching different types of pizzas, finding out what pizzas people like, designing our own pizzas and investigating ingredients. We have also needed to carry out organisational tasks, like deciding on our groups and planning the purchase of ingredients.

In Term One we took part in the Food for Thought programme through the Heart Foundation. We learned a lot about healthy diets and lifestyles, and the facilitator left us with a $60 Pak n Save gift card to put on a healthy lunch. With that money, we decided it could be used to purchase the pizza ingredients, so teachers did not just put on a lunch, but we designed and made it ourselves.

We decided on the name 'Ōtautahi Pizza' for our website. Then Mr K created a design brief for us to create a logo for it. This was loads of fun and many of us made entries for the competition. Some of the requirements included the logos being professional looking, using appropriate colours and that they must be our own designs.

To choose a logo, Mr K set up a Google Form for us to vote on which design we liked best. Arona's design, with a red and black background was the one that most of us chose, although many of the others will be put on our website for viewing.
Here is Arona's chosen design:



The designing of our pizzas took two weeks. This included lots of group discussions, negotiating ideas, exploring different herbs and spices, and using the Pak n Save website to calculate prices. Many of us have also been using the Tayasui Sketches School app to draw our ideas to show what we are making visually. This is also the tool many of us used for our logo designs.



In groups, we made sure that all the ingredients came under $60 in total. Last night Mr K took our shopping lists to the supermarket and picked up the ingredients we asked for. Guess what? It came to $59.71! Nice work on our behalf to make the most of the gift card.

This morning we organised roles within our groups, like someone to construct the pizza base, someone to put on the toppings, a videographer, and a group manager. Everyone managed their roles so well and the morning was a real success. We were so proud of how the pizzas turned out and we are looking forward to constructing our website and sharing the recipes with you, including some other interesting site sections we are planning.

And yes, they tasted really good!

We would like to say a special thanks to Sheryl, who helped us create the pizza bases and prepare the toppings during organisation time.

Get Cinderella To The Ball - Part 3

You may have seen on Twitter that in Mr K's literacy groups we have been making modifications to Cinderella's carriages that we have built.

We spent time learning about different sources of electricity and the important role that it plays in our lives. Our carriage rolling competition required our vehicles to be propelled by gravity, but we have been harnessing wind power by adding sails to our carriages in order to move them in a different way. We actually learned that wind power is a renewable resource, which we know is better than non-renewable resources.



It took a few days for the wind to come up enough for the carriages to get rolling, but we did have some successes. On one day, we even got out the leaf blower to get them moving!



Check out the link here to one of our tweets showing a short video!

Get Cinderella To The Ball! Part 2

We have just completed our carriage competition, using our constructed vehicles in a challenge to see which one will roll the furthest down a ramp.

The carriages were just being propelled by gravity. We learned about friction and momentum, making sure that we tested and made adjustments throughout our construction process.

Here is a short video with some of the competition highlights:


Our next step is to create videos of our own projects using the media we collected along the way.

Check out our individual blogs for these videos.

But, this project isn't finished yet. Wind power is on it's way...

Get Cinderella To The Ball! Part 1

This term we are putting the spotlight on our How Stuff Works theme, one of the three core themes we are integrating through our learning this year. The key ideas are around observing and investigating how physical and material phenomena can change, and also exploring and acting in issues that relate science learning to our daily living.

This current project that Mr K's literacy groups are working on is connected to The Fairy Godmother's Day Off, the story we have been doing a lot of literacy based work around. Our project has us in pairs designing, building and testing our very own carriage to get Cinderella to the ball. Each carriage must meet a set of specifications, then we will compete in a roll-off down a 2 metre high ramp. The winning team will have created a custom carriage that will roll further than all the others.



We have had to learn about some key scientific ideas relating to gravity, friction and momentum. All groups know that we need to reduce as much friction as possible, as too much will slow the carriage down. Now that we have built a makeshift testing ramp, groups have been testing and modifying their carriages, playing around with weights, different wheels, spoilers and axle placements, to name a few.



There is a lot of buzz around this project, evident through the number of students who found many of their materials at home (mostly in their yellow recycling bins). We are really looking forward to the competition.

Measurement - Understanding Perimeter And Area

Over the past two weeks, those of us working with Mr K for maths have been learning all about finding the perimeter and area of shapes.

Once you understand the basics of what each of these words mean, it might seem quite simple. However, actually calculating perimeter and area requires knowledge of measurement units, how to measure, as well as additive and multiplicative numeracy strategies.

After some focussed workshops in the first couple of sessions around this, the last session was a group assessment project. We sorted ourselves into groups of 3 and the task was to create a video to show our understanding of perimeter and area. There was a one hour time limit.



It was interesting to see how some groups were able to communicate ideas effectively and successfully negotiate group roles. Other groups found this the challenging part, despite actually having a good understanding of the mathematical ideas.

Arona, Quinn and Cole were one of the groups who we all thought were successful. Below is their video, which as you will notice, clearly shows their understanding using a simple playground shape as the subject.

Ka pai boys!

The Effects Of Music Project

A group of students working with Mr K were doing some musical exploration yesterday. We made some nice links between our My Voice Is Powerful theme for this year, where we can explore the arts in our world as a way to express ourselves, as well as our key competency focus on Managing Self. In this area, we have been working on making thoughtful and responsible decisions. The day-long project was also an opportunity for us to learn a little about the science of musical instruments and how they create different sounds.

We began the day by doing a variation of the well known 'Take a line for a walk' art activity. We listened to Stayin' Alive by The Bee Gees and simply let our hand do what it wanted as it moved across the page during the song. As the music speed up, slowed down, changed pitch, etc, we made different movements with our markers.

We then chose 3 colours that we thought fit with the song. Mr K modelled how to blend the 3 colours underneath our lines, then we each completed our own piece. There is no right or wrong, we were simply wanting to show how we all hear and interpret music differently, which adds to our uniqueness.

Good Luck To The Bromley Brains!

We are really excited to have our Year 5 team, the Bromley Brains, taking part in the Canterbury ePro8 semi finals this coming Thursday. This is an engineering competition, in which the team qualified by coming 4th out of 12 teams in the regional heats a couple of weeks ago. We also had another team, the Year 6 Bromley Coders, who performed admirably but unfortunately missed out on qualifying for the next round.

The Bromley Brains worked so well together and no doubt will have a fun, but intensely challenging time again this week.

We look forward to seeing how you go!

An Introduction To Tynker Coding With Mandy

On Monday the 26th of February, Mandy, our e-learning specialist, came in to Koru 1 to teach us a little about coding and introduce us to an app called Tynker. 

The reason we are learning about coding is that people say that in the future, people will need these skills to perform some of the jobs that may exist. 

Firstly, we had a discussion about what we knew about coding. Then Mandy explained to us some important words to do with coding. These were algorithms, sequences, commands, bugs, debugging and programming. 

Next, Mandy asked for a volunteer to be a robot to show how programming works. Jonty was chosen. Our task was to programme him to get to the door at the back of our classroom. We gave the commands, Willow W wrote them on the whiteboard, and Jonty followed our commands to reach the door. 

After that activity, Mandy introduced us to an app called Tynker. We logged in using our Google accounts and she explained how to use Blockly coding to complete the challenges and go up the levels from Space Cadet to Dragon Spells. It was interesting to see how Mr K can see how we are doing from his laptop. 

We found this session really interesting and our class learned a lot about coding and what is involved. It was awesome to see everybody engaged and enjoying what they were doing. We look forward to learning more about coding this year. 

Also, our DT Tuakana group is starting up a lunchtime coding club beginning this Thursday!

This post was a shared writing piece from Mr K's literacy groups. 

Special Visitors This Week

On Thursday this week we were very excited to have some special visitors to our school.

The government announced a new policy around putting mental health workers into a number of schools. More information can be found here.

The exciting part for us was that the Prime Minister held the press release from our school.

Our Kapa Haka group and two of our Ariki student leaders, Sheldon and Helena, greeted the PM. She then spoke to some of our teachers and parents about the benefits of the initiative.

How Well Do We Work In Teams?

On Monday we participated in a team building activity. We were in groups of four and the challenge was to build the tallest, free standing tower, using a set of specific materials.

The main aim of this activity was to work well in a team. Some of the ideas we generated around good team work include; strong communication, showing we care, sharing our creativity and contributing.

Everyone took on a specific role within the group. It was fantastic seeing all the different towers being constructed.

We ended with a discussion about what went well and what we could have done differently to be more successful at working in a team.

 

The General Election - What Are The Party Policies?

It has been a very interesting week learning so much about the upcoming election. We have received our kids voting ballot boxes in the mail.

Here is more information about the kids voting programme. 

After watching this video, we now know how to vote, but not all of us know who we want to vote for. We realised we need to find out more about what the parties all care about.

On Monday we split into small groups within our larger literacy groups. Each group was allocated a political party contesting the election, where they had to research what the party policies were (the policies are the list of things that each party say they will do after the election if they are in government).

Over the next couple of days, each group used Google Slides to collaboratively put together a presentation to share back with us. Mr K and Mrs Harris made it clear that we were not persuading people to vote for the parties, but simply explaining what their policies were.

Savannah said, "It was fun doing the research, because I already liked that party. It was good using Slides because we can share it with everybody in our own group and they could each do their own parts. I asked the group if I could do water policies and everyone agreed. Ava found out about a policy for getting kids to school safely and reducing rubbish and Kelli did some other policies. I was a bit nervous sharing back to the class with all those eyes looking at me!"

Yesterday we began coming up with ideas for policies we would try to campaign on if we were involved in a Bromley School election. We tried to think of things that would improve our community, either to address existing problems, or just new exciting ideas. 

Next week we will be looking closely at some of our policy ideas. Could any of them be worth exploring further?...

Student-Led Workshops - The Beginning

Today was the first time we have introduced structured student-led workshops in Koru 1, outside of our ICT workshops. We are hoping that the middle block on Thursdays (11.30am-12.40pm) will be a time where Koru 1 students can take the lead, using their personal skills and knowledge in certain areas to teach others.

We can propose ideas for workshops to Mr K or Mrs Harris and write up a plan. This plan will include what the learning focus for the workshop will be, how many children can attend, and what resources will be required. Our peers will be able to opt into our workshops.

Today's workshops included:

Scratch Jnr (coding) - Run by Zavier
Basic division - Run by Korban
Book Creator app - Run by Lilly and Helena
Basic basketball skills - Run by Blaine

After the session, many of us started thinking of ideas we have for other workshops, and we are really looking forward to seeing where this goes.

I've Learned, Now I Can Teach You - Term 2 Interest Projects

The highlight of our last week of Term 2 was certainly the sharing of our recent IPs. Outside of the CCC Cycle Safe programme that was run for our Year 6s, each of us had chosen a time slot to take the stage in Koru 1 and share what we had learned throughout our IP journey. 

Kaizen sharing his IP on 'How medicine works'

For some of us this was the first time we had shared a project of our very own in front of as many as 55 people, who then gave constructive feedback about what we shared that included possible improvements that could have been made. This feedback will prove valuable for us when we create goals for future IPs. 

Land Yachts Footage

This video contains photos and footage of us working on our land yachts. Enjoy!

Click to view full screen and feel free to leave a comment.

More information about this project can be found here.

Kite Project - Construction and Testing

We are at the final stages of our kite technology project. We are busy finishing off our construction and some of us are even at the testing stage. We’ve been lucky to have a little bit of wind recently. This has given us a chance to see if our kites are capable of flight.

Some of us have discovered that our kites tumble through the air instead of staying lifted. We are making sure that our measurements are accurate and that our bridle lengths are even. We think this might be why some of our kites are spinning around.

Throughout last week we wrote step by step instructions on how to make our kites. We included diagrams and captions so that our instructions would be easy to follow.

We’ve been checking and discussing our rubric so that we know what we need to do to be successful. Managing our time and following the timeline has been important so that we finish our tasks and stay on track. Soon we will be marking ourselves against the rubric that we created and writing a blog about our kite making experience.

We hope for some decent wind this week so that we can really see what our kites are capable of.