6th Grade
Independent Project Spotlight: Gray
Mar 10th
6th grader Gray recently finished an independent project using the Phun 2-D physics engine. His goal was to “make a magnetic accelerator cannon or a railgun sort of thing to fire very fast destructive projectiles,” and “it was achieved through balancing properties of mass and density.” Nice work, Gray!
Independent Project Spotlight: Rowan
Mar 5th
My name is Rowan, and I am a 6th grade student doing an independent tech project about important issues around the world. My website has links to other websites that are helping to solve these issues.
Check out my website to see how you can help too. You can leave comments right here on the tech blog. Thanks.
iPad deconstruction
Feb 1st
The 6th grade spent the period deconstructing the marketing around Apple’s new iPad announcement.
We started with the official video that greets visitors to the Apple website. What does Apple want us to believe about the new device? How do they use music, backgrounds, demonstrations and interviews to convince us?
Next we broke up into groups to figure out if the iPad is a technological evolution or revolution. Every group clearly agrees that this is merely an evolution – as Abe pointed out, “it’s just an iPod Touch that won’t fit in your pocket.”
Could the iPad be a replacement for your home computer?
What’s behind that website?
Jan 25th
We use websites every day to do all sorts of things: watch video, communicate with others, research and explore. How is it that computers know what a website should look like to the viewer?
6th graders got behind the scenes today as we learned about hyper text markup language (HTML), a way that computers speak so that webpages show up in a way that humans can understand. HTML is a foreign language, but we can learn to speak it and therefore have a better understanding of how websites work.
Every time you visit a website, your computer downloads the HTML code before it shows you the images, words and videos you are looking for. You can actually see this code by right-clicking on a webpage and selecting “view source” or “view page source.” Depending on the browser you use, you may see color-specific code, where tags are one color and content another. You can even add comments into the code that are for other coders.
We did this with a few pages and saw some similarities:
- at the top of the code, it always says <html>, which tells the computer what language the document is in.
- each page has a <title> tag, which shows up at the top of the page
- HTML tags begin and end with ‘crocodiles,’ which look like this < or this >
- a slash (/) means end/cut/stop
Next we jumped into building our own webpages! We used a program called Kompozer, which allows you to write actual code, or just write content and have the program turn it into code. So far we are just getting started, but there were some cool discoveries. Kallie figured out how to change the background of the entire page, and Eli inserted some images from the web into his page. Rebecca made one page link to another and Mason got his page open in Internet Explorer so he could see what it would look like if it was really online.
Typing kicks off
Jan 17th
It’s that time of year – 6th graders created typing accounts to begin regular practice. Students are expected to start with 2 days of practice a week, for 5 minutes per session. The goal is regular, incremental improvement through repetition. A couple tips for improvement:
- speed comes with good form – focus on sitting comfortably with fingers on the home row.
- keep eyes on the screen – your hands know where they are because of the tabs on the “f” and “j” keys and the space bar.
This typing practice can happen in the lab or at home. Time will be provided for all of this work to completed during writing/tech lab or tech class, but it is up to students to use that time effectively.
Once we’d all run through a couple of lessons, the 6th grade helped an 8th grade class with their “digital identity” survey. Results of this community-wide (students, parents and teachers) survey will be posted once data gathering and analysis is complete.
Revolution v. Evolution – C.E.S. 2010
Jan 8th
The International Consumer Electronics Show (C.E.S. 2010) is going on right now in Las Vegas. Today the 6th grade took to YouTube to learn about some of the cool new gadgets that have been released or demonstrated.
In looking at these new devices, we had conversations about the idea of technological evolution vs. revolution. There is some amount of opinion when it comes to using these labels with tech – and we had some great debates.
- Evolution - a natural next step for a device. (E.g., more megapixels in a camera)
- Revolution - a completely new gadget that has never been seen before and does something totally new. (E.g., the first satellite)
Our favorite new device of the day: Microsoft’s Project Natal
TechLab Tuesday
Dec 15th
TechLab Tuesday is back! 6th grade students took an hour out of their day to disassemble some broken electronics and learn about all the complexity within daily objects. One group attacked a printer, another explored a laser disc player!
Where do we go from here?
Dec 14th
The 6th grade concluded Internet boot camp this week. Everyone is clear on why Billings provides computers and Internet access and their responsibilities as users. We took a moment to define some common terms that will be used throughout their middle school technology experiences.
Student definitions:
| Web broswer | an application used to connect to the internet. |
| Application (app, program) |
software that can be installed on a computer to complete a task. |
| Software | a set of instructions telling a computer what to do when it receives input from a keyboard or mouse. |
| Search engine | a website you visit using a web browser so that you can find information on the internet. |
The difference between a web browser and search engine has been murky in the past for some students. We reinforced our Microsoft Excel skills from STeM class to build a comparison chart:
| Company | Web Browser | Search Engine |
| Microsoft | Internet Explorer | Bing |
| Chrome | ||
| Apple | Safari | x |
| Yahoo! | x | Yahoo! |
| Mozilla | Firefox | x |
| Wolfram | x | WolframAlpha |
| Opera | Opera | x |
Scratch Lab Lunches
Dec 8th
As the weather turns colder (22 Degrees F this morning!) some students are opting to eat lunch indoors. A group of 6th graders have organized a Scratch Lab Lunch series – Tuesdays upstairs. Today was our largest showing yet…5 students worked on various personal projects.
One team conceived and executed a brand new game, available to play below. Coding by Ben, artistic direction by Milo, and creative suggestions by Truman. This game was built in about 30 minutes…there is still a little debugging to do. Enjoy!
Objective: move the cows to the mothership
Directions: use the arrow keys to navigate and the space bar to deploy your tractor beam.
Smart surfing, smart emailing
Dec 4th
The 6th grade continued their foray into the wild Internet today with a lesson on phishing and tips on identifying suspect URLs. Students got the chance to play Anti-Phishing Phil, a teaching tool developed at Carnegie Mellon that helps students spot questionable internet addresses. All are encouraged to try playing the game in their free time.
We also continued our discussion about email. Students got their school email accounts last week and tested the service by sending emails back and forth. This week, we talked specifics:
What is SPAM?
Student definition: any email you get that you didn’t ask for and didn’t want. This means you can get SPAM from someone you know!
What is sarcasm?
Student definition: jokes or messages that mean the opposite of what the words say. You can tell sarcasm by how people say something with their tone of voice or body language – eye rolling, head shaking, etc.
Because an email doesn’t contain these non-verbal cues, sarcasm is really hard to figure out when words are just on a page or screen. Some people use emoticons or text language (j/k, lol, etc) to try and give readers a hint about their intent – but as a general rule, we avoid sarcasm in emails so that our friends don’t get the wrong message.
