We have several groups working towards participation in the Young ICT Explorers Competition and they are all doing some really fantastic explorations with using ICT to present their projects.
One of the groups – Bella, Declan, Ed and Zac have been working on the theme of the First Fleet as part of their Year 4 History study. They are creating some Scratch animations to show various aspects of this topic and lately Bella has worked on programming a Dash robot to follow the path of the First Fleet on a large world map. This involves the students working out the sequence of steps that Dash would have to follow to move from the departure port in England to eventually arrive at Sydney Cove. Working together, they had to verbalise the route and the directions needed to achieve this. Following that they had to explore the blockly program that they were going to use to program Dash. As part of their exploration, they discovered that they could record sounds and so are currently working on an announcement that Dash can make about the journey at various points. Their plan, after that, is to use Declan’s research on the hardships experienced during the journey, to make further comments about what was happening below deck for the convicts.
This project was also something we showed to some visitors yesterday, as part of a demonstration of our whole school approach to the Digital Technologies Curriculum, and they were quite impressed at the cross curriculum learning that was occurring within this project.
I have pasted the ACARA outcomes for Digital Technologies at the bottom this post. Of course, this work is also helping to differentiate the learning for students within History.
ACARA Digital Technologies:
Define simple problems, and describe and follow a sequence of steps and decisions (algorithms) needed to solve them.