DAY 8 COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

 DAY 8    COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

Lucky number 8 for those of us with Chinese connections - and a strangely creative and educational day it was too, so I guess I should count myself lucky to have enjoyed so many new experiences today.

It all started with the interesting opportunity to investigate the new digital technologies curriculum and I was very impressed with the staged development of the progress objectives with a clear pathway from lower primary all the way to NCEA Level 3. It was also interesting to see the expectations in terms of knowledge and ability required when advancing from one stage to the next.

I also appreciated the opportunity to get involved in some coding practice and thoroughly enjoyed getting to play around with "Scratch" and "Toxicode". I could immediately see an opportunity to make use of "Scratch" with my year 9 students as part of our current focus on music videos.

Later, I had the joys and frustrations of trying to get up close and creative with the "SculptGL" app, offering me the chance to create a 3D digital sculpture. I enjoyed creating from a cylinder base a surrealistic Easter Island totem, which was colourful, if not impressive. I then saved it and attempted to modify the totem by adding wings and got lost in wing shapes overlapping and folding in upon themselves. this is what can be viewed in the image below :

I then returned to my saved sculpture, only to discover that it was only the 3D shape that had been saved in readiness for 3D printing. Hence the frustration - I only have the image above to share and not the more artistic (in my humble opinion) sculpture.

However, today was a very enjoyable experience and I now look forward to applying what I have learned with my classes and to approaching my future in the classroom with increased digital fluency.