Google CS Video Design is a wonderful program filled with coding on Scratch, individual work, writing and sharing shout outs, and working toward a shared goal. In this 8 week long free program (thanks, Google!) we watch videos on how to code on Scratch — a kid-friendly website to learn the building blocks of coding. We also make our own sprites, also known as characters, and make them move, talk, and interact with each other! At the end of each lesson, there are 2 students that get to display their work in the Google CS Showcase. We had a wonderful volunteer at all of our sessions — shout out to Gilbert!
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Have you ever thought about how much sugar is in your food? What about the fact that 80% of schools have deals with fast food companies for school lunches? Do you know 3 other names for sugar? In this activity, Tech Lab got put into different teams and had the task of doing research the internet to answer big questions about sugar, diabetes, our government, and lunches in schools. With post-it notes corresponding to their teams, they ran from the computers to the posters to get the most correct answers!
Did you know that there are over 600,000 food items in America? Guess how many of them have added sugar? 80%! Isn't that crazy? That is just one shocking fact that the Tech Lab learned while watching the critically acclaimed "Fed Up". "Fed Up" is a documentary about the childhood obesity epidemic in America and tells us how sugar is ruining our chances of being truly healthy. We highly recommend this film and give it two thumbs up!
Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-BUM-Buuum, Bum-Bum-Bum-Bum-BUM-Bum-Bum-Bum-Bumbum ... That’s the sound of Jeopardy! How many glasses of water should you drink a day? How much exercise should kids do every day compared to how much adults should do every day? What are the different kinds of exercises we endure? These are all questions that are answered in the renowned documentary film, “Fed up.” Our Tech students watched this film with a critical eye and tested their knowledge in teams with a little bit of Jeopardy. Next, we will watch "Black Fish" and see how orcas are being poorly treated while living at Sea World.
Melody is a teacher from the General Assembly. She was kind enough to come to Tech to teach our students how to code their own websites using JSFiddle and learning HTML and CSS. Our youth made home pages about their lives and added pictures, too! This Spring, we hope to continue this project and make the websites more complex! Imagine this: you have to build a home for an Octopus named Ollie. He is 1
foot tall and 1 foot wide. He needs room for his car and his brother and he NEEDS a couch! The only challenge Š the materials you have to work with are paper clips, paper, markers, take, plastic utensils, and newspaper! In the R.O.C.K. Tech Lab, we interact with architecture challenges that include engineering, team work, and fun!
What is the difference between a long shot, a medium shot, and a close-up shot? How can those different shot types contribute to emitting certain emotions from the scene or the characters? How do certain film genres perpetuate stereotypes and how do tropes add to specific genres? In this lesson, all of these questions are answered. Our Tech students learned what various shot types look like and what those shot types mean in the context of the film or TV show. They learned which narrative elements make up genres like comedy, horror, and musical. They observed how tropes (recurring commonalities in one genre) are easy to find if you know what they are! For example, a trope in a Western film is a “wanted poster” or a gun with one bullet left. |
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