Last day at piano

It's our last day EVER at Enrich. Anyway I still practiced piano today. I've learnt so much since I started learning piano. I started about 7 weeks ago but I've only had about 7 days to practice at Enrich. The songs that I've learnt how to play are not the whole song but they are: Ode to joy, Merrily we roll along, Lightly row, Marianne, When the saints go marching and a waltz. I really enjoy learning the piano and I hope that I can continue next year somewhere else. Here is the music for one of the songs that I've learnt.

Data Logging

Yay It's finished. Today I finished the temperature sensor programming today. Then I thought that I should try it and Alex helped me. We got a cup of water straight out of the tap and then pressed the button to start the data logging. I didn't think that It would be very hot, but it was about from 15-25 degrees celsius. I tried it on my arm and it got to about 31 degrees. Next week I'm going to try making a speed logging one. I'm not too sure what it does though.

How hot is the water?

light sensor

Temperature sensor

Robots are so difficult to program. I've carried on programing the NXT Lego mindstorm. I've tried it two years ago so I sort of have an idea on how to use them but I still use the guides on the app that we use to program them. There are lots of different sensors that you have to make to put on the Rem bot. I made one which was the light sensor. Which I then programmed it to follow a black line. It took about five minutes, then you just click the download button and it downloads to the NXT. I don't think that we've used the temperature sensor on the robots before so I thought that I would try it. I've started to program the robot to tell me how hot a cup of water is. (I think) I Haven't finished because it has about 83 steps to follow, but I will finish it next week.

Digital Citizenship

This afternoon we were put into groups and then went off to talk about digital citizenship. It's about realising the implications when you are using Facebook, Twitter and Flicker. First Nicola gave us a sheet that had the names of all of a person's friends and had lots of connecting lines to show that somehow they all connected. After we had talked about that we were given another two sheets that asked us questions like how often do we use technology at home and do our parents know what we're doing on the computer. Once we had filled out the sheet Nicola called us over to her to watch a video. It was talking about how everybody knew the girl's name just from the internet. The video above is the last video that we watched. It talks about your digital dossier which starts just before you're born and then just grows and grows.

Paper Chairs

Make a chair out of paper? That sounds quite hard, doesn't it? It is as hard as it sounds. We had about five newspapers to use and 45 minutes to make the chair. We used the idea of using triangles. It had three legs and a triangle base and it looked like a slice of pizza without the toppings. It had to hold one of the wooden frogs. I didn't think that we would be able to do it because of time but when Darryn said that we have another five minutes, I changed my mind. In the end we did get finished. When Darryn put the frog on, we weren't sure if it would hold but we had made a strong design and it did. Although we didn't win I'm pleased with how it turned out.

It's Moving!!!

Today we got our robot actually working. Now it moves backwards and when the touch sensor is touched it will move forward and then it turns around four times and move forward a little bit more and then say hello and display ‘What’s your name’. We’re still working on it because there are still some other things that we want to add to it, but at least we get to play around with it a to get to know how to use the Mindstorms a bit more. Next term we want to add a program that will make it say words that we tell it to.

Piano lessons at Enrich

I started learning how to play the piano. I asked Nicola to teach me and she gave me this book to teach myself, with her overseeing the process. I thought that it would be quite hard but I went quite fast through them. I learnt that the note C is always to the left of pair of black keys. It said to think of your fingers as numbers. So C would be 1, D would be 2 right up to G. I was practicing and practicing and once I thought that I was quite good at the piece of music I went and got Nicola and she would say if it was good enough or if I needed to practice a little bit more. I can't wait until next week to have another go but I will still practice at home.