After the initial design, printing and finishing can take hours. Here is that process in time lapse courtesy of GEMSTV! 

Two 7th and 8th grade Choice classes were busily working in the Innovation Lab this afternoon. Check out what these Fabrication Studio and Research and Development students were accomplishing.

Bonus Content!  Here is the first green screen video made with a 5th grade focus group earlier this spring. 

Our Gamemakers have been hard at work creating real video games using Gamemaker Studio. Beginning  with this class, we will be publishing some student games to the web by taking advantage of the HTML5 export feature Game Maker offers. Since control options are completely different, games will be published in two categories, for play on computer and for play on iPad or other tablet. The game featured here, entitled Maze Runner was designed for a computer with a keyboard and mouse, but does display well on an ipad.

No special software is needed to play other than a modern web browser such as Chrome. In the near future, we will create a landing page and an index of available games. The only other twist is that each game has two internet addresses, one for inside the school and another for people at home. If the link doesn't work for you, please try the other. Enjoy the game and consider leaving feedback in the comments section! 

First graders just completed a rotation in the Innovation Lab focusing on map skills along with fairy tales and fables. Within the unit students created their own maps using KidPix and explored their own community in Google Earth. Our last activity was probably the most fun. Students used Ozobots to navigate maps they created with paper and markers. We were able to integrate coding skills through the use of Ozocodes, or color sequences, students added to their maps. These codes made the Ozobots speed up and slow down, zigzag, turn around, etc.  Sometimes the codes worked perfectly and other times they did not, this proved to be a good lesson in troubleshooting and teamwork.  After a little practice students created their final maps and we watched the Ozobots navigate the lines and read the odes, all along telling the fable or fairy tale. 

As part of their colonization unit, fifth graders visited the innovation lab to experience the hardships of settling in a new land. In a Minecraft world, students were assigned teams and roles, provided with a limited set of tools and resources, and presented with similar survival challenges to the 1607 Jamestown settlers. Finding food, building shelters, and sharing tools and skills were all experienced by the students within the virtual world. Some groups struggled, others thrived, but all were highly engaged as the topic of colonization was brought to life!

Miss Bell's fourth grade class recently completed a research and digital content creation project in which they produced a green screen video asking the audience to guess their location based on the clues given and the backgrounds created. After some final editing, the video is ready for prime time. Enjoy!

Today our Programming Studio Class class was visited by Mukesh Kumar, a parent and community member who designs integrated circuits. As we teach students coding skills, it is important for them gain a basic understanding of the hardware that is engineered to work with the instructions or code they are learning to write. Our guest speaker explained some concepts involving circuit design and showed a complex diagram for an integrated circuit that was created to regulate power flow for cell phone and other device chargers.  Students were able to make connections between our class learning and the real world work of designing integrated circuits and the programming that work together to make our modern electronics function. 

Two of our recent Innovation Lab projects focused on video. First graders from Ms. Mackenzie's class read their animals in winter reports in front of the green screen and we were able to use their own drawings which were created in KidPix as the background. Mrs. Lee's fourth grade class used KidPix as well, but recorded their own narration with the laptop camera. Both projects demonstrate the power of technology in student creative expression. Check out both videos below.