Welcome to Room 56's Blog!

We are a class with 45 students, 2 teachers and 2 classrooms joined together. We love learning together in the flexible environment our class offers. Chromebooks let us take our learning to new places, creating movies, games and blogging to wider audiences.

Enjoy looking through our class blog, and remember to check in again to see whats new!

Room 56 reinforcing our learning with a Kahoot! quiz

Incredibox beats

I am DJ Prince here is my new beats created on Incredibox.com

Listen to my song here. Follow this link Chit

 Make sure you like my song when you have finished watching it.

Free rider

Have fun!

Game I cerated

This is a game I crated with Sploder

Make a Free Flash Game

WALT: write a report about _________ for our blog.

The Blue Whale is the largest animal ever known to exist.

Blue Whale

Description

The Blue Whale is the largest marine mammal. The Blue Whale is as heavy as 25 Elephants put together.  They grow up to 30 metres in length, that is the same size as 19 average humans lying down in a row. The Blue Whale is can be different shades of bluish-grey and are lighter underneath.

Habitat

There are three types of Blue Whale. They live in the North Atlantic Ocean, North Pacific Ocean, and the Southern Ocean. The biggest population of Blue Whales is in the waters surrounding Antarctica.

Diet

Blue Whales feed almost exclusively on krill. Krill are very small crustaceans. They look like a small shrimp or prawn.

Other Facts

There are approximately between 10,000 and 25,000 Blue Whales left in the world. In 1966 when they became protected there were only 5,000 left in the world's oceans. Blue Whales can dive down to depths of 3km and stay under water for 2 hours!

Whales need to be protected so that future generations can also see these beautiful creatures.

By Matua Jeff

Marble Science!

CHALLENGE: How far up a ramp do you have to roll a marble from, so it travels 82cm?

This was the challenge Room 56 received to help us learn about "fair testing" in science.


DAY 1
The students took off in their groups. Some set up their equipment on the carpet, some on the tables and some on the lino.

One group set up on the carpet.

After about 10 minutes we had groups reporting they had had a roll reach exactly 82cm. "Let me see", the teachers would say, but no groups were able to repeat this result.

To reflect at the end of the lesson we recorded where the groups had to release the marble to get their 82cm roll. The 10 results ranged from 6-29cm up the ramp. They were asked, why are our results so different? The students quickly realised all the things each group was doing differently; rolling surfaces (table tops, carpet, lino, etc.), marble sizes and , most importantly, the angles the ramps were held. We started to refer to these as "variables".

DAY 2
When doing the challenge this time we made sure to limit our "variables". All groups performed the activity on carpet using marbles of the same size, and all ramps were set propped up on 4 maths text books (using Blutak, 27cm up the underside of the ramp).

Measures, cm, displayed on the ramp.

Four maths book standard height.

This time results were more repeatable. Groups could consistently roll a marble to between 81-84cm, by releasing the marble from a consistent start point.

However, we still found a difference in the height up the ramp, of the start point, between groups. Were we missing some variables? Upon further reflection students thought we should have all used the same carpet square to test on, and used the same marble to test with (surface textures, and possibly weights, were different).  Our discussion was now using terminology, such as variables and controls. Each time we identified a variable, the students came up with global settings/measures to make these controls instead, making our results more reproducible.

Game Design Trials With Little Oaks

Room 56 have been working very hard to design an online game, using Sploder, suitable for their buddy students in the Little Oaks. We first has to look at games that are currently on the web, and analyse the good and bad features about each game. Here is an example using a game Room 56 really liked:

Game Name
Headless Zombie
Description
The zombie had to get to the door at the end of each level. He could take his head off to get past the puzzles in the level
Positive Aspects	Negative Aspects
Each level taught you a new skill. Started easy and got harder Had a storyline you were following	Character walked quite slowly Levels could gotten a bit harder faster.

Play Headless Zombie

One of the biggest positive features of a game was when the game taught you to play it. This is shown with games that start out easily, with each level bring another aspect the player can master before increasing the difficulty of the game.

With an initial analysis done, we got into the mahi of making our own game. Forefront in our thinking was always that the game had to be easy enough for our new entrant buddies to be successful, while also challenging.

Then came our first trial with the target audience. Little Oaks was invited over to our class and tried the games we had made for them.

Room 56 students made sure to ask what was good, and what needed further development in their game, and feedback was gathered in a Google Doc. In Term 4, Room 56 will be using this feedback to reinvent/edit their origonal game, hoping to make it even better for Little Oaks students. 

Here is one of the games Little Oaks got to play, let us know in the comments what you think:

Make a Free Flash Game