The Grand Finale

Our presentation was rudimentary but it's done. At least it made people laugh. And the summer school people got to ask questions about the washability of Kitronik components.

And off we went to the pub, where we reflected on what had been good and not-so-good about the SKE course (but I'm not going to write up all of that!) and said our goodbyes. PGCE year is on the horizon after the holiday.  An open mind is what is needed.

"You don't like them,

so you say.  

Try them!  

Try them!  

And you may!"

Getting it together

It was our last day on Design and Make before presentations tomorrow.  Darryl and I prepared a couple of videos, and brought together PDFs of an “Instructable” and the patterns for our wristband.  It's all in our PowerPoint, so I'll put that on here after we've embarrassed ourselves in front of Kitronik and the eTextiles summer school people.

Food, Glorious Food!

This morning we made stuff with eggs then feasted at lunchtime.  This afternoon we took on the Ready, Steady, Cook Challenge.  I was teamed with Mollie and our Sweet Potatoes in Orange & Bitters and Mediterranean Vegetable Stack with Bean Sauce came joint second (out of four).  Apparently we were too ambitious for the time given – the vegetables in our stack were underdone and the garlic wasn't properly roasted – but we were pleased with what we came up with and had leftovers for dinner!

It works! (Plus self-pity)

In our last day – or morning – of electronics we got our PCBs finished and working!  There was cleaning, drilling, soldering, trimming and testing to be done and it all worked out very nicely.

In the afternoon we did a bit more on our eTextiles project to start preparing for the presentations on Thursday – our wristband is fully finished and functioning now.  But I had a bit of a malfunction in my tutorial with Sarah, mainly about the course not meeting my expectations and it taking up my personal time with unnecessary (pointless) things, like this blog and the Design and Make project.  I will write up more reasonable feedback for Sarah at some point soon.

The fun is out there. You have to go get it.

Today has really made me think I could do this:  I could get excited about teaching kids electronics and getting them to use it in design.  I wouldn't be an expert, I'd be continuing to learn with the students as I went along but there's loads to enjoy about electronics – not just big concepts to be scared of.

It's really fun to start the day by destroying a capacitor to see what's inside then ending it using an acid sprayer bath to etch a circuit board with my own design on it, which will include and integrated circuit.  It helps that Circuit Wizard is such a functional, user-friendly programme.  I wonder how much of this I'll be able to recall in a useful way after the summer holiday!

Electronics, at last

When I opted to do the SKE course (it was added as a condition of my SCITT offer because I asked it to be) it was mainly because I don't know enough about electronics and “systems and control”.  I've been waiting to get into this stuff, and as we did I have started to feel like I would be OK with teaching it – which is the whole point, in the end!

We started off looking at currrent, voltage and resistance, building circuits on breadboards and trying out multimeters.  We moved on to thinking about input, process and output, using a transistor and a sensor diode.  There was a lot of brain work but I was happy to feel that as we worked through it step-by-step I could see how things worked and mostly could explain what was going on.  There's more tomorrow.

Teenage Mood around Food

Oh, man, I was grumpy today.  And we cooked loads of stuff but none of it was to eat.  And I still feel like all the “science” that's talked about in food sounds made up (I know it isn't).  Through this empathetic experience, I now know what a teenager might feel like in a food science theory lesson (I can't remember my own teenage, it was too long ago).

So anyway, we were focussing on macronutrients.  There was a lot of talk about molecules.  We investigated what happens when you heat food.  We tried different kinds of starch as thickener.  We cooked some egg in test tubes and beakers.  We cooked sugar, bacon, potato and flour.  We popped corn.  We talked about dry and moist heat.

There was a lot going on, and we still had time to have a little play on Food in Focus 2, which is quite a cool, simple computer programme for designing and analysing food.  I really like the idea of teaching food but being taught it makes me grumpy.

Tasting and Testing – More Adventures in Food

Today was all about describing food in order to design and evaluate.  We started off by tasting stuff: doing a preference test, a triangle test and a ranking test.  It's always interesting to see how people's senses differ (even though this wasn't the point of the tests).  We talked about test methodology too, and used a star diagram to show preference against an evaluation of a product.

Getting into some cooking, we were investigating fats and raising agents, with a pastry bake and some scones to compare and describe the different characteristics and processes that work to achieve the desired product.  I accidentally grilled my egg custard tarts, but the least said about that the better.

Design and Technology Association (DATA) Summer School at DMU

The DATA day was great!  I was expecting a bit of a dry day (which the introduction to the new GCSEs was a bit) but the afternoon session, “Being a D&T teacher is like playing a game of Monopoly.  Discuss”, was fantastic.  I'm going to try to note down as many good ideas as I can on the ideas page.  And I got a free glue gun and a tape measure.  What more could one want?!

My SCITT Induction Day

I had to miss another day of the SKE for my SCITT induction day. It was really good to meet my cohort of 38 at Rushey Mead Academy. There are 4 of us doing D&T, and it was a really good time getting to know people and get a bit more of a feel for how the next year would be. I'm so pleased that I've made the right choice for me about where to go for my PGCE year.

Playing with textiles methods

I missed yesterday's textiles session, but I learned from everyone that they covered basic weaving, felt-making and knitting. Besides being a terrible knitter, I have plenty of experience with those things so I didn't miss out on new skills.

We started today with a quick look at the "visual language" of textiles (from a fashion point of view). Textiles projects are usually quite 3D but we often need to communicate ideas with 2D methods, like working drawings or fabric designs. We looked at the St. Martin's Fashion Folio to identify what is being show - things like the techniques that will be used, swatches of textures or patterns, and the methods of communicating (photography, collage, etc.)

In textiles, but throughout D&T, we are helping students communicate ideas: using initial sketches and brainstorming; technical and/or working drawings; final designs; presenting the finished item, as drawings or photographs. So we warmed up with some drawing exercises, and thoughts about how to give children a start by providing them with a blank figure to draw onto and how to convey fabric drape and movement.

We tried out a textiles CAD programme called SpeedStep, which was outright winner of most buggy software used to date and I have no reservation in saying I won't be using that version of that programme any time in the future. In theory it functions by working on vectors (lines and points, not pixels) and bitmaps (solid objects, colour fills, patterns) in separate programmes then bringing them together.

For the second half of the day, we got on with looking at and trying out some “smart” materials, and using the heat press for some sublimation processes.

Catching up

Jamie is still ill, so Darryl and I are working independently to catch up with our ePortfolios and make a start on the step-by-step “instructable” for the design and make project.