Contestants 2011
Here are the amazing contestants selected to take part in the Learners Y Factor with Jason Bradbury in London on January 9th, 2011:
THOMAS TALLIS SCHOOL - LONDON
SALTASH.NET COMMUNITY SCHOOL - CORNWALL
CENTRAL FOUNDATION SCHOOL FOR GIRLS - LONDON
ST MARY'S CATHOLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL - STOKE ON TRENT
LOUGHTON SCHOOL - MILTON KEYNES
BEATRIX POTTER SCHOOL - LONDON
Come along and cheer them on!
;)
THOMAS TALLIS SCHOOL - LONDON
Pop Up School
In November 2010 representatives from three London schools visited the Creativity World Forum in Oklahoma to collaborate with their American peers on creating a Pop Up School. We hoped to demonstrate the ability of young learners to disrupt traditional notions of what a school could be. Rather than a bricks and mortar establishment, we set about generating social capital online in the months prior to the conference through a variety of social networks and blogs. We conceived and planned our Pop Up School collaboratively. We held Skype conference calls to get to know each other better. We created a website to host our investigations at the conference and we made a presentation to 1500 delegates about how learning is changing.
We believe in the erosion of the classroom walls. We know that learners need real audiences and that these people could easily live in another country. We believe in the value of networks of learners and the power of personal, handheld devices to transform the experience of learning, turning consumers into producers, makers and sharers. We think our Pop Up School experiment contains some of the elements of what great learning can be like now and into the future. We would like an opportunity to share our experiences with other learners so that they too can begin to take ownership of their learning adventures with others from around the world.
Ages 10-16
http://creativepioneers.weebly.com
;)
SALTASH.NET COMMUNITY SCHOOL - CORNWALL
Xbox marks the spot
We are a group of students who love games based learning but want to help younger students solve problems and their anxiety of the transition from primary to secondary school through the enjoyment of playing games. We without doubt as a group and our project have the Y factor. We are currently designing a game that will be played on the Xbox and on PC’s, we are using the free Microsoft game making tool XNA to create a video game that younger students in our community can play to learn more about our school so that when they chose to attend this secondary school they are less anxious about moving from their smaller primary school. We have currently programmed the platform of the game, the layout of the school and all images and the next phase of our development is the construction of the content and the game play. By Easter 2011 we will launch the game by giving each of our primary schools an xbox and will introduce the game ourselves with a view to students playing it before they attend the school transition days later in June and July 2011.
This is a brilliant, extremely creative and innovative idea that will make a massive impact on the lives of children not just in our school but potentially in the rest of the world. This is a great learning experience for us as we are developing game making skills and gaining experience of using the coding language. In addition once the game is completed and we take it to all our 7 primary partner schools the Year 5 & 6 students in those schools will play the game for fun but will learn a massive amount as they do it. The game will be played on the Xbox that we will be fundraising to buy each school. The students playing the game will learn many things about the school from the geographical layout, to the schools systems and even get to know the subjects, teachers and other students. This will make them much more comfortable when they move from their primary school to their secondary school. We believe that we can then communicate this process to other secondary students all over the world and encourage them to make games like this to help the transition from primary to secondary school.
Ages 15-16
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa937791.aspx
CENTRAL FOUNDATION SCHOOL FOR GIRLS - LONDON
Apps For Good
Since September 2010, 19 girls between 13-18 years have been working hard to come up with problems they want to see solved through mobile apps in their communities. In teams of 2-5 they have been working through critical thinking, market research, design, technical feasibility, UI design and business models to make it happen.
Apps for Good is a program by education charity CDI Europe that is delivered in partnership with Central Foundation Girls School in Tower Hamlets.
In November the girls fearlessly presented their initial ideas in front of 150 people at TalkTalk in Soho (see here) and we are now submitting the Transit team to present at the Y Factor.
Transit is a speech-to-text-to-text (and maybe back to speech) translation app for teachers interacting with Bengali parents in Tower Hamlets. See the initial slides and problem video here. Once you have watched the embedded video you will see why the girls have the Y Factor. In January they will be much better than this presentation.
Ages 15-16
http://www.central.towerhamlets.sch.uk/cfgs/
ST MARY'S CATHOLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL - STOKE ON TRENT
Aethelflaed and the Anglo Saxon Trail
We are class 6 from St Mary’s RC Primary School in Stoke on Trent and we are looking at the Anglo-Saxons because we have the famous Staffordshire Hoard that we can go and visit in our Museum.
We are using Augmented Reality with a program called Second Sight and Sony PSPs. We have been creating media to put on the PSPs so that when the cameras see a semacode (which is a bit like a crossword) the things we have chosen will be triggered on the PSP and then people will get extra information. This lets us provide extra facts about the pieces of treasure in the hoard, making the hoard more exciting!
We have a set of mobile Phones on loan from the CLC and we have all learned how to use them. The Wildknowledge software on them lets us create interactive quizzes and maps, everyone in the class worked in pairs and created a quiz so that we can have this information with us as we travel to Hanley and Lichfield.
We had the phones with us all the time and if we were not answering our quizzes we were collecting and recording what we saw from the very beginning of our trip to the end.
Our project included lots of trips to collect information- we were even asekd by museum visitors about the hoard!
We think it's got the Y factor because we used our PSPs to give us extra information as we went around the Staffordshire Hoard exhibition in Hanley Museum. We had media loaded onto our storage card which was triggered when the camera recognised a semacode. We used video, audio, still images and some text. This is called Augmented Reality. We are also creating the PSP media for Year 5 to be able to use when they visit Lichfield Cathedral.The people at the museum are so pleased with us that they want to use our work on their new website (staffordshirehoard.org.uk), to be launched mid January” and our teachers have agreed to create a Teachers Pack for it.
We have prepared lots of media to add to the website.
Using the HTC Phones, we created quizzes for our trip to Lichfield Cathedral and when we arrived, we used them to record everything to create a virtual tour.
We learned lots of other new things like how to use Poser to create a 3 dimensional version of our Aethelflaed (a Saxon Warrior) and create a game using YoYogames.com where Aethelflaed was being chased by lots of warriors. We used Crazytalk6 to make an Anglo-Saxon video. We went metal detecting and made an Saxon coin. We hired an Saxon Warrior for the day and had a battle. We have also set up a website to show off what we have done.
We prepared a news interview, interviewing the warrior queen. We also interviewed Terry Herbert, the finder of the Staffordshire Hoard, by manipulating video from youtube.
Ages 9-11
LOUGHTON SCHOOL - MILTON KEYNES
Robot Club
Robot Club began as an after-school club organised for children in Years 3-6 at Loughton School, a junior school in Milton Keynes. One of the school governors, an expert in robotics, set up the club, which met after school once a week. The club was very successful and, in 2008, sent a Year Six team to China to participate in the world RoboCup Finals.
This Y-Factor entry is from a group of four children who left Loughton School and moved up to secondary school this year. They were inspired to keep working on building and developing robots. The Robot Club meet at each other’s houses and have built a variety of robots – inspired by constructions they have found on the Internet and viewed on YouTube.
The video submitting as their entry (see link below) was scripted, filmed and edited entirely by the children. It includes footage of two of the robots they have constructed together this year – a guitar and a robot that solves Rubik cubes.
Robot Club allows us to take as long as we need to work on our projects. We get inspiration from people we know, and from videos we find on YouTube. When we run into problems, we have to find our own solutions by doing research online, and asking other robot builders.
We have made several robots, from a very simple robot that moved around, to a Rubik-cube-solving robot.
Some good subjects that Robot Club has helped us to focus on include engineering for the building, computing, and mathematics for the programming. We also have to focus very deeply on how we program and build our robots.
Being in Robot Club at school made us want to think outside the box and do things at home. It was so great that now most of us have got kits of Lego Mindstorms and are still building. We entered this competition to show how we have done it at home.
Ages 9-11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpTeemsOE-A
BEATRIX POTTER SCHOOL - LONDON
The Digital Orchestra
The Digital Orchestra is a multimedia, interactive, performance. Pupils, teachers from local schools along with dance and performance specialists and artists and technology consultants from Wandsworth City Learning Centre have collaborated to create a series of unique multimedia performances based on a range of curriculum themes. Participants use various touch devices as part of their performance to create a ‘live’ media scape environment within which additional performers and audience members interact. The performances utilise video, music, lighting and other stage effects controlled by various touch controllers and interfaces. The performances feature a mixture of dancers, musicians, technicians and audience participation. The basis of the project are the touch controllers’ i.e. iPad, iPhone, iTouch and Android phones as well as a cluster of computers running each area such as the video, music and lighting. The pupils have designed the touch interfaces as well as creating the media to trigger both the musical and visual elements. Each controller is deployed to a specific task decided by the students. The students have designed specific controller graphic user interfaces (GUI’s) to their taste in the preparatory sessions as well as creating the musical and video elements as well as choreographing and directing the movement.
The pupils at Beatrix Potter School have taken their development of the use of handheld technologies to support learning, to new heights. The school has been consistently pushing the boundaries for understanding how new technologies can play a huge part in shaping future teaching and learning practices and in this latest project, the pupils have once again taken the lead in their learning and created a stunning multi-sensory performance based on one of their history topics. All of the pupils involved in this project gave up a week of their summer holiday to work with CLC consultants to trial and develop the technology involved. They have continued this term to develop the piece by refining their performances and developing new skills and ways of utilising the handheld devices to enhance the performance. Practically all of the creative input and resources have come from the children themselves with the teachers and consultants helping to develop their ICT capability. The students are also helping CLC staff to write a new control technology scheme of work based on their experiences, the first result of which is already being trialled in another local primary school.
Ages 9-11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkRuOndCzaI
