Pearl's Blog

For design I am doing Hummingbird and my partner is Chloe. Hummingbird is like Micro Bit and Makey Makey, a small circuit board with wires. There are two different Hummingbirds you can choose from. One is wireless and called a Hummingbird Bit, this one is for anything that rolls around. The other is called a Hummingbird Duo, and this one you have to plug into your laptop, so it’s for things that light up, flash or dance on the spot like the jitter bug. There are lots of projects you can do with your Hummingbird on the hummingbird website, (eg. the Rover, a small robot that cruises around, and the little drummer boy, that’s hand moves up and down above a drum.)

Chloe and I are doing a bunny. Its eyes and maybe are going to light up. We haven’t done any coding yet but we have made the bunny and a little cardboard carrot that the bunny is looking at. The eyes don’t move but we have drew them so they are looking down and to the right. Seeing as it’s nearly Christmas we thought it would be cool if we added some baubles that I made from pipe cleaners to the whiskers. I also made a string of light and tangled them around the ears.

I hope you liked this blog because it might be my last.

I have learnt a lot in Micro Bit so I’m going to share with you a few things I have discovered.

I have found out how do add and make music. You can make different tunes and beats. You can even put in a tunes that that are already created.

You can also put little pictures in your code that show up on you micro bit. You can use premade pictures or you can make them yourself. There is a square with lots of little boxes in it. If you tap on them they turn white, which means that the one you have shaded are the lights that will flash on your Micro Bit.

I also learnt that you can make your Micro Bit show words that slide across your Micro Bit. You just type them up on your code and they will appear when you hit download.

Last but not least, I learnt from doing the night sensor that you can make a code that works by light. So when it is a certain lightness or darkness it will show or do something. It could show a word picture or even play music.

Thanks for reading this post, I hope you enjoyed it.

 

 

On Micro Bit I made a Night Sensor. Mr McKie sent out a email to 5B and it had lots of websites with lots of Micro bit ideas on it. One of the websites had the night sensor and it looked like it wasn’t to hard to I had a go. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do so I looked at the code on the website then tried to make it step by step on Micro Bit. I did that a few times then the code looked the same. I changed a few things like what the Micro Bit reads.

The night sensor works by light. When you press A it shows a message but it only works when it is a certain darkness. It also plays a little tune but it only does that on the Micro Bit on your screen. I learnt so much doing that project but it wasn’t as fun as experimenting with my own projects. The night sensor wasn’t to hard or easy because it didn’t take me that long but I had put pieces of code in other pieces of code. Down below is a snip of the Night Sensor code. Stay in touch for more posts.

In my last post I explained what Micro Bit is and how it works.

This post will be about one of my own Micro Bit projects I have made. I love animals, especially horses. My project is about horse facts, so when you click on A, B, A+B or you hold it up or down it will show a horse fact. It also shows a picture related to what the fact is. Like if you click A it might say a fact about foals, then show a picture of a foal. I really enjoyed researching for horse facts and I learnt a lot. It was quite easy to code and pretty fun to play with. I learnt a lot more about Micro Bit doing this project and discovered lots of new things I could do with my projects in the future.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about my Micro Bit project, make sure to read my next post.

A Micro Bit is like a circuit board that you connect to your computer with a cord, a bit like Makey Makeys circuit board. After you have plugged your Micro Bit into the computer you go onto the Micro Bit Website and start watching the videos. You will learn how to code with your Micro Bit, so you can start the tutorials and coding things you self. After you have coded something you press download and it goes onto your Micro Bit.

Thanks for reading my Blog Post, stay in touch for more Micro Bit Posts.

My first Rube Goldberg machine was quite simple. I placed a toy car on the cardboard that was getting held up by two stacks of books,(first  stack higher,) it rolled down the cardboard then fell off the second stack of books, knocking down the first domino. The dominoes had a chain reaction, the last domino hit a marble, which caused it to roll down the marble track it was sitting on, then finally it rolled into the cup. I achieved my task which was to get the marble into the cup and used three simple machines, the inclined plane, which was the cardboard and the axle and wheel, which was on the car. On my first go it was a SUCCESS but when I placed the toy car on the cardboard, its back wheels got court. I picked it up and placed the car back, back wheels on the cardboard, it worked! YAY! I hope you enjoyed reading this post, but don’t go yet, there are more Rube Goldberg machine posts to come.

Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. He was born of the 4th of July 1883 and died on the 7th of December 1970. Rube Goldberg used his drawing and engineering skills to make cartoon and machines that performed simple tasks in overly complicated ways. Over the years many people have copied his ideas and made their own machines. Dominoes, funnels, marbles, cups, toy cars, and marble tracks are all common pieces of equipment that people use for their Rube Goldberg Machines.

Stay tuned for more Rube Goldberg posts and thanks for reading!

Right now in Design we are working in Scratch. We were able to choose anything we wanted to do for our project. First we had to make an inspiration page about the topic. Secondly we had to make a page about three ideas we could do for our project. Then finally a page about our chosen idea.

I chose Japan as my inspiration because I love Tokyo and cherry blossoms. My final idea is called Bursting Fireworks, this idea is like a game but I’m going to try and make it calming. Balloons will slowly float up to the sky and if you tap on them they will turn into bursting fireworks. I will have pretty cherry blossom backgrounds, colourful balloons and magical fireworks. I have started to make it on Scratch but it will be a challenging project.

Stay tuned for more posts!

Hi, I’m Pearl and I’m also new to Geelong College.

I have one brother called Louis who is new to Geelong College as well but he is in year 4. I also have a French Bulldog called Heather who  loves cheese and, this is going to sound disgusting but it’s true, liver treats, my dog loves liver treats, anyway she is still adorable. Then there’s Peggy, I don’t want to judge her but she is a little chubby, Peggy is my British Blue cat, she is very affectionate and loves rubbing her head on everything. Anyway, back to me, I love food, animals, music and cooking and my favourite colour is blue. Well I hope you learnt something different about me and stay tuned for more posts.

This week we have been working on Scratch. Scratch is a program that allows you to create your own stories, games and music.

The year 5 teachers have given us lots of challenges like:

All About Me – This challenge was about creating a project that best described me, for instance, I love my pets, spending time with my family and the beach so I might do a project about my Mum and I taking my dog Heather, for walk on the the beach and even have me talking about things I love to do.

Debug It – By searching up Debug It on Scratch we found lots of projects to debug, easy and hard.

The Dance Challenge – The Dance Challenge is about creating a brilliant dance with your sprites and making them move in different positions. I had to use my knowledge about angles to work out how and where the arms and legs would go.

The 10 Block Challenge – The year 5 teachers gave us ten Scratch blocks to make a project with. I found this activity quite challenging because you could only use the ten blocks you were given and not change them.

Build A Band – This challenge was about creating your own band. We had to program instruments to play music and people to sing.

This picture above is of a code I debugged, I found it quite easy because all you had to do was put the ‘When Flag Clicked’ code at the top of the program. (The ‘When Flag Clicked’ code means when you click the green flag at the top of your screen your program will begin.) I hope you have learn’t something about Scratch and enjoyed my post. Stay tuned for more posts about Scratch.