Dawn of a new age – introducing the App Design Gamalan Orchestra
In a moment of inspired silliness the app design students made a simple, fun app that turned their mobile phones into bells. Accordingly an impromptu Campanological performance was done, the results of which are here for your amusement.
On a developmental note we may take this idea a little further and aim for an actual piece of recognisable music next time.
Designers of the Week
What’s a pleasure it was to come back to this group of individuals after soanynweeks away. What was fabulous to return to was an amazing level of engagement with their projects. All the students had either brought something in or had undertaken further independent research and really pushed their design thinking forward. So this week I would like to celebrate this whole class! Nice job everyone and keep it up!!
Animators Get Going on Personal Projects
The Elements animators have spent the last few weeks thinking about communication and how to originate a piece of animation that effectively communicates. The last couple of weeks we have been experimenting with materials and set ups to try to understand the complexities with bringing to life their ideas. Come back soon for the outcomes.
First lot of MP3 Speakers
The year 9 speaker project is coming to an end and the first lot of completed Ines came through this week. The intent behind the design of this product is to try to highlight the implementation of sustainable design strategies like upcycling, use of recycled and recyclable materials and design for disassembly. The students have worked on their speaker grills using Adobe Illustrator and then laser cut them. This is a nice form/function challenge that the students enjoyed.
Armature Animations
This week we got to finally animate our armatures and apply the thinking about animation that we have been working on for the last few weeks. There was a perceptible quality improvement in all the outcomes with a few of the groups really excelling this week. Temujin, Jaden, Maximilien and Alvin deserve a special acknowledgement and Conrad, Julio, Allessandro, Sarah, all produced some really nice aspects in their work. The story to animate was that the character is sitting when a piece of paper falls, they notice it, pick it up and react. The choice of reaction at the end was up to the students to choose and communicate. Please enjoy!!
Temujin
Maximilien and Alvin
Conrad and Julio
Jaden
Sarah
Allessandro
Mr R’s Designer of the Week
I’m really happy to be able to have another designer of the week to celebrate. This week’s comes from my year 8 class – Hani. Hani produced a great clock design that really cleverly used shape and colour to create a very 3D effect in his design. I really look forward to seeing this one get made!! See for yourselves.
Make club
Make clubbers assemble their microbit kits – exciting!!
Mr R’s Designer of the Week
Well it is actually more like designer of the “term so far” remiss as I have been in my celebrating if individual work. So it is nice to be able to celebrate once again Wenxi’s work. This young lady shows a great deal of technical and creative skill in her work and an intuitive understanding of process. Her development of her speaker grill to the point where it can be cut by the laser cutter exemplifies this. Well done Wenxi!
Animated armatures
This week we have been extending the work in character animation by developing armatures – the skeletons that are covered in clay or other materials to form characters in stop motion. Next week we will bring them alive!
Year 9 D&T speaker grill design work
As the year 9’s progress with their mp3 speaker project they have turned their attention to the design of the speaker grill. Using an approach called design rules students were asked to come up with a range of design based on a restricted design vocabulary i.e. A set of design rules. In one set of ideas this was limiting the design to using only straight lines and circles for example. The purpose of the exercise is to generate a range of ideas quickly and to reflect on whether these limitations help or hinder creativity. Here are some of the results for you to judge for yourself.
