Teach Meet #2 held at Tormead turned out to have quite surprising outcomes. The Digital Genius family extended it’s inclusive arm to both students and staff. ( …this event also attracted a parent too!) the difference on this occasion was the mix of experience. The greatest, by which I mean knowledge of Swift, coding experience was actually a Y7 student. She happily sat and gave us all her pearls of wisdom and displayed an unabashed approach to tackling coding the MeeBot to dance using Swift Playgrounds. Which is one of the amazing challenges that can be undertaken this year by our Digital Genius students; I can’t wait for her submission.
The challenge incorporates an additional element, of composing an original score in GarageBand. The Apple Teacher programme does a great job of guiding teachers through the seeming complexities of this incredibly versatile app. On the surface the app looks complicated but as we proved at our short evening session, GarageBand is fun! It has some incredibly powerful features and most importantly can turn even the most tentative musician into a virtual maestro! At the Teach meet we all had an opportunity to become mixologists…of music and not cocktails. Using the live loops option is so easy and allows even the reluctant musicians to produce a harmonious melody especially one that a robot can be coded to dance to…as a result of our thirty minutes hands on session, five more teachers are now going to give it a go. Heading for their students golden ticket for the final dance off to be held at Solutions Inc’s Annual Education Summit on June 15th 2018.
If you’d like to inspire your students to have a go at coding with Swift to synchronise a MeeBot Robot to move to an originally composed score then this years coding challenge is for you. Check out the Digital Genius Website for more information. Better still sign up and come along to one of our ambassadors Teach meets and experience a masterclass from some of our amazing partner school ambassadors.