Collecting together all the different resource that may have application in the classroom
Although the idea may seam a little gruesome, a new medical procedure makes use of a 3d printer to replicate the heel bone for a cancer patient. Normally the leg would be amputated as part of the regular operation, however, a new heel was printed out of titanium and used to save the foot. See the News report from SBS for the full details.
As part of year 7 ICT (a junior ICT class), we are exploring if we can trust the source of the information. So I presented a PowerPoint that DHMO produced, talking about the dangers of the substance and provided a link to dhmo.org website for the students to read. By treating the website and it’s ideas as real my goal was to fool the students and to then reveal the lie for a classroom discussion.
Following the reveal, I prompted the classroom discussion with some questions, making it a little like a detective story;
The aim here is to start students critically think and evaluate about the websites they look at. Check out, Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools and Evaluation of Web documents, both from Cornell University’s Library.
Other peoples resources;
Ballistic Publishing have a good range of art books covering areas like Matte Painting, Concept Art, Character Modelling & Design, Game Art. The really good thing they do is provide an online copy you can flip through to determine how appropriate it is for a school.
The Creative Essence Series which started with The Face provides a good foundation in how to create the human face on computer in 3D. It starts with the reference photography moving through modelling, UV mapping, texturing and finally into rendering. Aimed at mid-to-advanced artists it will need to be supported with a range of activities to reach this goal. I did trial this in year 11 VET Multimedia class to limited success.
Inspiration can be found in each book in the d’Artiste series which covers one of a range of digital art subjects with the aim of being an artist master class, the Exposé Series which is a yearly collection of fine artworks from around the world, and the Exotique Series which focuses on beautiful CG characters.
These books are best suited to senior visual arts students as a way to inspire and to provide ideas & examples
The Raspberry Pi has bee around for awhile as a kit which places computing in the palm of your hand, and reportedly Raspberry Pi Microcomputer Still Selling Like Hot Cakes. It gives you a low cost computer which can be loaded with a number of basic OS (See their downloads). This machine can be modified with a growing range of projects, and there are a good collection of teaching resources to go with it. There are two new crowd funded projects that will be worth following, Pi-Top and Durio Sound. Both of these show health development in the micro computing area.
Also see;
Interactive Stories in their simplest form are Text Adventures, but how can you easily enable students to create these adventures for themselves?
A simple sample task for use in the classroom, with the handouts for Keynote or PowerPoint.
It’s interesting to see graphically simple challenging games like Flappy Bird, Geometry Dash, and Phases. All of which have game play that challenges the player, and it is a point of renown for those that achieve the highest scores.
This trend seamed to start with Flappy Bird, which has a simple touch control that controls the bouncing motion of the bird. The challenge for the player is in timing the motion to find the games through the pillars. The graphics hearken back to Mario, so much so that comments about a law suit appeared on the Internet. The game topped the Apple iStore, spawned many clones, and the creator pulled it down for a little while.
Piano Keys has simple black and white squares that the players much touch in rapid succession and keep up with the cascade of tiles that flow down the screen. The challenge lies in the number of piano tile that you can touch within a time limit, the speed the tiles move, or the how long you can last.
Geometry Dash is another game that exemplifies simple game play with stylised graphics. The player needs to move a cube through a series of side scrolling platform environments (levels) with various spikes, walls, and pits by jumping the cube over or under these. Alternative parts of each level have the cube transform into a spaceship that flies through a similar level. The spaceship naturally falls, and touches cause it to fly up at a sharp angle.
Phases has simple graphics, with the player controlling the left and right movement of a ball and it bounces through an dangerous spiky environment.
All these games share similar traits from the arcade games of the ’80s, in that they have simple stylised graphics that just get the idea across, and the focus on challenging game play with the aim of making the game superior.
Cloud Services are a big thing with major companies, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and now Oracle in a price war over cloud computing. Although this does mean a reduction for users of these services. Like many people I use cloud services like Dropbox, copy.com, and Google Drive.
So one of the things I’ve wanted to do is setup a cloud based file sharing for my personal projects to gain control of the storage and for the experience. Students asked me about best way to share their files. I found ownCloud a open source project to enable cloud based file sharing.
Overall it’s easy to install, and to use. However, you do need to have SSL certificate (used with https) to avoid creating security problems. I’ve found references to scaling problems around the use of SQLite (which is part of the default install), but this can be fixed by moving to MySQL.
I attended the DLTV conference which had too much funky stuff. AIE‘s session about the Unreal game engine and how it could be used in ICT teaching, was excellent giving me a good background and some cool ideas to try out.
Knowing little or nothing about all these different game engines, I thought it was worth some background research. Ralph Barbagallo’s Blog has a good overview of the various game engines, with some insightful comments. Digital Tutors provides a similar overview and Arges Systems gives an in depth comparison. For a fuller discussion I reads through some of the Unity Forums.
Edit: Unreal is now free for student!
I’ve just found out via FB that Adobe have made the entire collection of CS2 software for free. The Creative Suite includes Premiere Pro and After Effects for video editing, InDesign for magazines & books, Illustrator for graphics & line art, and of course Photoshop for image & photo editing. It does not include Dreamweaver, which become part of CS3. Of the package the biggest score is Photoshop, which has dominated the photography industry.
However, this grab bag of software does have some caveats, addendums, and cautions. As old software, it is no longer supported, so the current operating systems will be less capable of running is as the hardware improves, and the software will be more vulnerable to malware. So use at your own risk.
Adobe has disabled the activation server for CS2 products, including Acrobat 7, because of a technical issue. These products were released more than seven years ago, do not run on many modern operating systems, and are no longer supported.
Adobe strongly advises against running unsupported and outdated software. The serial numbers provided as a part of the download may only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2 or Acrobat 7 and need to maintain their current use of these products.
The specs, mean that is should run on anything from this century, or at least the last decade.
Download: Adobe Creative Suite 2