This year, as well as teaching Year 6, I have been developing and enhancing Bitterne Manor Primary's computing curriculum. I've been leading Years 4, 5 and 6 through some cutting edge projects, combining all of their computing and design skills.
Earlier in June, I had the privilege of speaking at the CAS (Computing At School) South West Conference in Winchester, and also the CAS National conference in Birmingham, where I showcased some of the work we have been doing, and the reaction was phenomenal; computing teachers and leaders from across the country were blown away by our projects and have vowed to take it back to their own schools to try out.
We have been using our 3D design skills in Sketchup to create 3D characters and vehicles, which we then export as a series of 2D images (So when you play the images one after another, like stop frame animation, it looks like the character is rotating).
In school, we use Scratch to learn and practice our programming skills and, because it does not accept 3D objects, we imported all of our 2D images into the costume area for our sprites. We then programmed our sprite to change costume at the same time as direction, making it look like we were controlling a 3D object!
The pupils in Year 4, 5 and 6 have really enjoyed creating these projects, I will try and arrange a way for them to be able to show them to you. They have shown amazing effort and resilience, and have honed their collaborative and problem solving skills in the process.
Well done everyone!
