Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2016
Year 4 have a great ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ display. It takes up half of their practical area and welcomes visitors in with a variety of 3D objects and things to do. All it lacks is sound, which gave me an idea… What if I could make a machine that would play a ‘random’ sound effect or quotation from …
Just a quick idea… I was working with Year 4 this afternoon making music with Scratch, based on an another idea from Phil Bagge here. One child made what sounded like the first four notes of ‘Frere Jacques’. At that point, lots of the children asked if they could make the rest, so we did! It gave a good excuse …
Here’s another possible extension to Phil Bagge’s excellent ‘Maths Quiz‘ set of lessons (see this post for previous thoughts)… The way I’ve taught children to make a quiz is to make a script for one question then duplicate it, replacing the question and answer in each block repeatedly with the new ones until their quiz is finished. Although this is a …
Year 2 are currently studying arctic wildlife so this provided a meaningful reason to explore how a branching database works. I’ve used a few branching databases over the years, notably ‘ReTreeval’ and ‘Textease Branch’ – part of the Textease suite. Both programs are a little dated but still functional and I still like the way ‘drag and drop’ way Textease …
I’ve been working with year 4 making quizzes in Scratch – an idea from Phil Bagge’s excellent Junior Computer Science planning. Once the basic ‘if / else’ loop is in place, there are various ways the children can adapt their program to make it more interesting. Some children added sound for right and wrong answers, some used broadcasts to change …