Peter Pan Dress Up Day!

MakerEd Night

Christchurch Connected Educators’

MakerEd Event

Have you ever used Scratch before? Programmed a robot? Tinkered with circuits? Play with a beebot?  Well, if you have, you’re secretly a Maker. Being a Maker means that you tinker - you play with technology, crafts, anything really. If you can hack it, repurpose or create it, you’re a Maker.

On Wednesday, a group called the Christchurch Connected Educators ran a MakerEd Event for teachers. The MakerEd Event was brought into fruition to teach the teachers how to make regular kids into Maker kids. The 3 eLearning and MakerSpace Leaders at Selwyn House helped out Miss Fairhall - one of the teachers in 8CF and our Director of e-Learning and MakerSpace - with a BeeBots workshop. We helped show the teachers how to work the BeeBots, and also helped out with another teacher’s EV3 workshop.

One of the many parts of MakerEd is Scratch, an open-source block coding resource. Sign up and have a go here, or try one of the games we’ve made!

Introducing Jiwon!

New Leadership Positions

Quadblogging & Custard

custard

ˈkʌstəd/

noun

1. a dessert or sweet sauce made with milk and eggs, or milk and a proprietary powder.

Right? Wrong. Our definition of custard is something a little different. Custard is an acronym used as a guide for writing quality blog comments, something that’s currently very useful for us as this term we are doing quadblogging! 

Custard:

We use custard to help us when we write our blog comments on our quadblogging classes’ blogs. This term we are quadblogging with three schools, and we make up the fourth. Our quadblogging buddies are:

• Irongate School
• Balmacewen Intermediate
• Rotorua Intermediate
• and us!

We think that this is a great opportunity to help improve each other’s blogs, and we are starting to have some ‘comment conversations’ with our quadblogging buddies!

Here is a conversation Joanna had with Megan from Irongate School:

Now you can give it a go! Next time you comment on a blog, use this method.

Try it by clicking the button below!

-  Ella S & Kathleen

Robotics

        

   

What do you think of when you hear the word “ROBOT”? The Terminator? A cyborg? R2D2 or C3PO? Probably something different to what the Selwyn House Senior Robotics Club members think. When we hear “ROBOT”, we tend to think of a more peaceful bunch that don’t intend to destroy (or save) the world.

Over the last term Robotics club has been working towards Robocup in 3 weeks. Robocup is a worldwide competition, although most New Zealanders stick to our National or Regional competitions. You must build and program a robot- most of the time, an NXT or an EV3 like the one shown above. The preparations are very stressful for everyone!

We have been working in teams to create performances in 3 categories, Theatre, Rescue and Soccer. In Theatre, teams choose to rather make a skit or a dance routine for their robot and them to do. In Rescue, the competition is set up in a Search and Rescue scenario. Your robot must complete challenges, such as finding and pushing a can out of a square. Soccer (quite a self-explanatory name) is where a team of two robots play a game of soccer, like a sports competition. The overall winner is determined by winning the most of the games. 

We will be posting another post in three weeks about what happened over the competition. Wish us luck!      

Independent Netball Trials