Year End Wrap Up Part 5 Projects

This is Part 5 in the series of Year End Wrap Up posts.

Scratch Projects

Students in grades 3 - 5 finished up the year presenting their projects to their peers.  Students had a great deal of choice on their topic, as long as it included flight.  A number of students decided to create flight games or animations in Scratch, a free coding program designed at MIT to introduce students to the concepts of computer programing.

I've embedded each of their Scratch projects below or you can view them in the Scratch Studio here.  A few things to note:

• Scratch requires Adobe Flash, so you need to allow it in your browser (Chrome won't run it, as far as I can determine, so better to switch to Firefox or Internet Explorer).
• To see the coding behind the game or animation, which I highly recommend you do, click the 'See inside' button -- you'll have to go to the studio link to do this
• All of the students did a great job solving bugs in their programs and learning new code
• Other non-Scratch related projects will be posted soon!

Animations

Gerry created this animation as a fun finale for his slideshows on RC planes and the history of flight.  Click the green flag to start the animation.


Anya created this animation as an introduction to her slideshow on space flight. Click the green flag to start the animation.

Games

Iain created this game involving hot air balloons.  Click the green flag to start the game and then use the up/down arrow keys to move your balloon.  Can you beat the high score?


Sophie created this game with info on aircraft.  Press the green flag to start the game, the up / down arrow keys to move the plane and collect coins and avoid hitting the birds.


Ezra created this game involving jet airplanes.  Press the green flag to start the game and the space bar to keep your jet in the air.  Try not to hit the green blocks and other obstacles.  If you'd like some music to accompany you on your flight press numbers 1, 2, 3 or 4 on your keyboard once the game begins.


Oscar created this game involving blimps.  Click the green flag to start the game.  Use the arrow keys to move your blimp through the maze.  Your goal is to collect hydrogen tanks and to avoid the bad guys.

Field Trip 2018

This past week it was time for the annual Gifted Program field trip for students in grades 3, 4 and 5.  We hopped on the yellow school bus with our friendly bus driver Larry and made our way to Kelowna Airport for a tour of Southern Interior Flight Centre.



Link to photos from our trip (link).

We were welcomed by  Marc Vanderaegen, the flight school director.  Neal, one of the pilots at the flight centre was our host and tour guide, along with George Cann, operations manager at Okanagan Mountain Helicopter.  George had brought a training helicopter over to the flight centre so that the students could get an up close and personal look at the machine.  George explained the basics of how a helicopter works and then the students got to take turns sitting in the chopper and checking out the instrument panel and main controls.

After checking out the helicopter Neal showed the students one of the flight centre's single engine fixed wing aircraft.  The students got to sit in the cockpit and get a sense of what it is like to pilot a small airplane.

Neal and George shared their expertise with the group and answered our questions.  They each worked very hard to convince the students that (a) flying is a great profession and (b) that helicopters were better than airplanes (George) or (c) that fixed with aircraft were better (Neal)! 

The students were excellent guests; they were polite, well behaved and asked great questions!

Thank you to our chaperones; Rebecca Aubie, Heather Glynes, Kristin Maier, Terry McCartan (his 5th trip!), Julie Read, and Adam Schroeder.  It was great having them along! 




 

Project Work

Here are a few things we have been doing this week in gifted.

Flight Lesson

Students were presented with the following slide show (link).   As we progressed through the slides the students were asked to come up with a hypothesis to explain why the things grouped under the 'Yes' column were grouped together.  As they were presented with more images they revised their hypotheses.  Eventually all of the groups figured out why the 'Yes' items were grouped together -- can you?  Go through the slides slowly and one at a time.



The above activity lead to a discussion about the different types of flight we see in birds.  I asked students to try and notice the different ways that birds fly as they are out and about this week.

Project Work

For the past month students have been busy on their projects.  The slideshow below shows some of the projects students are working on; there are a lot of students using the computer coding program Scratch to create games or animations, but there is also a lot of variety!  If the slideshow isn't showing up for you, or if you'd like it full screen, then click on this link.



Thanks for checking in to see what we've been up to this week!

Spring Update

It's been awhile since I've posted here, so we are long overdue for an update!

This year the theme is flight and the students have been busy learning about different aspects of flight; from flight in nature to human made flying machines.

Last month the grade 3s, 4s and 5s started working on The Big Project!  Students have a lot of choice as long as their project tackles our theme.  Here are some of the projects on the go:

• Comparing the characteristics of different paper airplane designs
• Creating computer games with Scratch in which participants will learn about; blimps, or hot air balloons, or jets, or the history of flight.
• Presenting research on butterflies in the form of a magazine
• Recreating a newspaper from the late 1700s with stories on major advances in hot air balloons and parachutes
• Creating a Scratch animation on space travel
• Designing a luxury rocket
• Sharing research on drones, other remote control airplanes, travel to Mars and more...
• Producing a child's picture book about bees
• Making a model of the Wright Brother's first successful powered airplane    

More on these projects in the upcoming weeks.

The younger students (Thursday afternoon class) have started a timeline on the history of flight as well as learning how to program with Scratch.  The timeline is below--click on the arrows to go through the timeline.  (If you received this post via e-mail, you may have to go here for the timeline to be visible.)




In the last couple of weeks, the students did some activities exploring Bernoulli's Principle.  This principle helps to explain how airplane wings and bird wing provide lift.  For photos of some of these explorations please check out the slideshow below or click on this link.



Thanks for checking out what we've been up to the last little while in Gifted!