Ms. Coutts' Class

Category: Applied Design Skills and Technologies (Page 2 of 2)

Black Canadian Excellence

March 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Throughout February, Division 3 celebrated Black History Month by researching various individuals of note and summarizing who they are and what they do/did into one to three PowerPoint slides. Students discovered a wide range of Black Canadians that have contributed to our country through sport, politics, art, activism, education, and more.

Students collaborated on a shared PowerPoint file, each person adding their set of slides to the overall composition. Division 3 has been learning how to communicate information effectively. In their slides, their goal was to use visuals and point form to communicate the main ideas clearly.

Please check out their work with this link: Black Canadian Excellence

Cave Art

December 8, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Division 3 has been looking at the emergence of art as early humans developed conceptual thinking and and some understanding of themselves in relation to the world around them. Examining the cave paintings from France, Spain, and Argentina, we noticed they often pictured large animals such as mammoth, bison, horses, deer, etc. Some of the paintings featured depictions of humans and arrows or spears. Some anthropologists suggest these depictions may have been intended to “enchant” big game animals for a successful hunt. Or maybe they were recording stories from their lived experiences for future generations. The negative-space hand prints are, perhaps, the most haunting of the cave paintings. It’s almost as though you can reach out and touch our early human ancestors living in the midst of an ice age!

Earlier this week, we headed out to the forest to collect raw materials that could be combined to create painting tools. Students gathered sticks, grass, rocks, leaves, etc. Then we brought them inside to adapt the raw materials to create useable tools. We agreed that we could use twine to bind things, but no glue or tape.

Finally, we got to painting on our “cave” walls! Students worked on vertical surfaces and different heights to experience a tiny bit of what it might have been like to paint this way. Some students worked more independently, and some collaboratively in order to create their images. They attempted to work in the style of the cave paintings from France and Spain, and depicted similar subjects as well.

Hour of Code & Computer Science Education Week

December 6, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Hour of Code takes place during Computer Science Education Week, which is this week!

Some smaller versions of our now-grade 7s! This photo is from when I visited UHE a few years ago to teach some coding, back when I held a district position.

The idea behind Hour of Code is get everyone participating in a coding activity at some point throughout the week. Students have all different levels of experience with coding, and it has become part of our B.C. curriculum. While we understand that not all students will grow up to become programmers, learning coding and computational thinking in school helps demystify the powers that drive our everyday technologies, broadens participation in the field of computer science, and nurtures problem solving skills. It is essentially a new literacy needed as our children grow up and navigate the world.

Thinking about coding and modern technologies is especially interesting as we also examine and think about prehistoric technologies early modern humans used to survive, thrive, and observe their world.  Division 3 has been looking at some of the earliest cave art found in Spain, France, and Argentina. This week, students are combining found natural materials to create tools that could be used for painting–then we will test if they work! Keep an eye out for some of our process and finished pieces!

I have positioned some coding links on our Hour of Code page. Feel free to check them out!

 

Beading in Binary

September 23, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Students have been exploring how to write numbers in binary code. Binary is a base-2 number system that is the foundation for machine commands. Each bit in this 6-bit series below can be turned either “on” or “off” in order to represent a value. When a bit is “on” it is represented with a 1, and when it is “off” it is represented with a 0. For example, in order to write the number 10 in binary, we would write 001010. The two 1s appear in the places of 8 and 2, so 8+2=10.

What is the largest number you can make with 6-bits? How would you represent the number 24?

Division 3–Have you noticed the strange addition sentence sticker on my laptop? Have a look the next time you’re here and see if you can solve it! (Hint: it has something to do with binary!)

 

This week students learned that letters can also be coded in binary using the ASCII alphabet. Each uppercase and lowercase letter can be represented by a decimal number that is translated into an 8-bit binary code. Students mapped out their the letters of their names on grid paper, chose their colours, and beaded their names into a bracelet. They used a different coloured bead as a delimiter to separate each 8-bit letter.

Here is a message for you, Division 3. Let’s see if you can decode it!

1001000  1000001 1010000 1010000 1011001 01000011 01001111 01000100 01001001 01001110 01000111

Métis Finger Weaving

March 2, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Today Division 3 learned a bit about the history of the Métis sash, or ceinture fléchée. We tried our hand (or rather our fingers) at a textile technique called “finger weaving,” used by Indigenous peoples all over North America.

There are different styles of finger weaving, and some can be very complex, so we started simply with using five loops (check out the instruction video here).

Students worked in pairs to help each other learn the process. One student held the yarn while the other did the weaving.  Weaving was like learning some new dance steps, but once we understood the pattern we were flying!

We only started with two colours, and some people tried three or four colours for their second try, but I wonder how it will look with five different colours? More experimentation to come! We will also try some other methods of finger weaving.

 

They look amazing! We all used the same yarn–can you think of why some weaving might be wider than others?

The First Computer Bug

January 21, 2022 / / 1 Comment

Division 3 has been working on coding with Code.org. We have been focusing on sequencing and algorithms with the goal to create “beautiful code,” meaning code that is efficient and straightforward. Sometimes we run into errors where our code doesn’t run as we expected, and we must review our sequence to find the “bug.”

In 1947, Grace Hopper and her team of computer scientists reported the world’s first computer bug.

It was a moth.

Click on the picture below for more information about Grace Hopper and the world’s first “debugging!”

Binary Bracelets

October 29, 2021 / / 2 Comments

In September students learned how to write numbers in binary (a base-2 number system). Today students learned that letters can also be coded in binary! Each student mapped out their names on grid paper, chose their colours, and beaded their names into a bracelet.

Here is a message for you, Division 3. Let’s see if you can decode it!

1001000 1000001 1010000 1010000 1011001 1001000 1000001 1001100 1001100 1001111 1010111 1000101 1000101 1001110

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