>Terms 3 & 4, 2021: Dealing With Restrictions

Much of Terms 3 & 4 was disrupted by the national lockdown restrictions. Term 3 was the start of our school inquiry topic of 'Journeys'. This is an account of the limited progress that we made.

I had been working with a few classes to use Scratch as a way to tell the stories of their whānau journeys or whakapapa. The students can tell their stories as an animation and narrated in any way they like.

I used the example video I found on Animating Captain William Hobson's Journey to Waitangi as a starting point for demonstrating how to tell each story in Scratch.

I have also provided them with ideas on how they can make the journeys animation more interesting by either recording their own voices as an mp3 or using the 'Text-to-Talk' feature of Scratch if they did not feel confident with recording their voices.

The intention is for the finished program to be operated using a Makey Makey. So each element or section of the journey programmed in Scratch will need to be assigned to a particular key. To assist the class, I constructed a prototype of a touch panel using cardboard, aluminum foil speaker wire, aluminum tape and duct tape for the students to attach the Makey Makey onto.

This worked really well, but I decided the panels would not last long as they are not robust enough. Through one or two iterations, I have now made several panels using wood instead of cardboard.

The hope was to resume this project on our return to school. Alas, there was no time to complete this so I will reserve this project to be delivered in 2022.

Term 3 was also an opportunity to work with all Y7 students (and some of our Y8s) to look at how we could develop cross-curricular ideas for our Maths programme at school. These ideas are detailed in the section Cross-Curricular Contexts.