Farewell Ms Vanderpuye

Today, we sadly said goodbye to Ms Vanderpuye after nearly 26 years at Oakington.

Ms V as she was affectionately called by all pupils and staff, decided to take early retirement and at a party held in her honour, she remembered the journey Oakington had made to reach its outstanding status in ICT and Computing.

In the days long before USB pendrives and terabytes of storage space, Ms Vanderpuye reminded her guests of what had gone before.

Her interest in computers started as a 15 year old, it blossomed as she got older. One of her first computers was one of the first solar powered calculators which she  still has at home –it has seen better days but still works when she tested it last week, after more than 30years. Some people may not have heard of some the first computers Ms V had owned such as Sinclair’s ZX80, ZX81, Dragon 64, BBC B, BBC Master with PC emulator MS Dos, Acorn computer with RISC OS, before moving onto a Windows 3.1 PC.  All of this was even before the Internet as we know it now.

BBC Master

Acorn with RISC OS

Dragon 64

BBC B

WIndows 3.1

SInclair ZX80

Sinclair’s ZX81

SAMSUNG DIGITAL CAMERA

Ms Vanderpuye thanked the Governors, the SLT and staff and pupils for allowing her the opportunity to pass on some of her passion. Ms V gave a personal thank you to  Mrs Libson for all her love and support she had given her for more than 30 years since they had known each other. She thanked her two network managers, Andrew and Gaddi, without whom ICT & Computing would not be as ‘Outstanding’ as it is.

Ms Vanderpuye said that the highlight of her evening was the fact that so many ex-teachers of Oakington came back to celebrate with her.  There was also a very beautiful performance from one of Ms V’s favourite robots, Bluey with messages from twins RedCandy and RedCurrant too.

Staff and pupils will miss very much Ms Vanderpuye’s enthusiasm and her love for all things ICT and computing. CONGRATULATIONS AND GOOD LUCK, MS V!

 

 

BB8 and Drones

Our robots have some new additions to their family, introducing BB8 and Parrot drones. We are using Tickle app to programme them. RedCandy isn’t too sure about BB8.

Ms Vanderpuye said goodbye to her Nao family and their new additions.

 

Space History

Today, Tim Peake made space history by being the first British astronaut to go into space. Lift off was around 11am  and early enough for all classes to be glued to their classroom screens. Brilliant!

 

‘Future Box’ Project

At the end of last academic year Oakington joined the ‘Future Box’ project, which is a collaboration between designer/technologist Stef Lewandowski, founder of Makeshift and primary school teacher Gavin Summerfield from Heber Primary School in East Dulwich, London.

The aim of the project is to create a prototype a inspirational box for schools that contains amazing gadgets, kits and tools to inspire children to learn about how technology works. All as part of the Computing curriculum. Oakington was keen to explore this knowing how keen pupils and staff were in ‘new technologies’.

Since September Ms Vanderpuye and her Coding Club have been trialling Makey Makey and Ozobots. The club have been amazed at how they have been able to use these seemingly ‘simple’ technologies to program and to create simple codes in the first instance and more complex ones as they have made more discoveries about the two technologies.

The ‘fun’ thing about Makey Makeys has been in creating a piano keyboard with bananas and other everyday items or playing bongo drums with a school tie. How does that work?,  asked one of the children. They soon found the answer when they related what they knew about electricity, conductors, insulators and circuits. As long as they were ‘earthed/grounded’ they could make most things work with the Makey Makey.

When the Ozobots arrived the Coding Club kids couldn’t wait to get them out of the box. Ms Vanderpuye hid one in her hand before gathering all the children around a pod to get them guessing what was in her hand. Given that the club had been discussing what might go in our ‘Future Box’, it didn’t take long for children to guess that it was an Ozobot in Ms V’s hand.

What does an Ozobot do? Well,  this clever little robot uses colour codes (red, blue, green and black )to follow instructions to turn left, right,  move forward, speed, up, slow down etc. and placing various colour combinations on a line you can make Ozobot do lots of fancy things. We have only recently started working with Ozobots so we are still exploring. You can draw you own mazes and paths for Ozobot to follow. As it follows the line Ozobot flashes the colour it has tracked.

We now have Nao robots, Makey Makey and Ozobots in our Furture Box. What would you have in your ‘Future Box’?

 

Leading Leaders Network Visit – Day 2

The final day of the Leading Leaders event was a roundup of the interesting things the group had seen at Oakington. Mrs Libson wished everyone well and took some questions and answers. Mr Smith thanked all the children for their hard work in showing them around, talking about their school and showing off their Computing skills. This was followed by a hands-on workshop with 2Simple Software’s Nigel Canin, looking at some of the latest developments from 2Simple and having a play with 2Code.

 

Leading Leaders Network Visit – Day 1

Today we had a visit from 15 Leading Leaders from around the UK. The group led by Mr Jeff Smith from IET and the Brent Schools Partnership. The group as with all the LLN events, were looking to be inspired by Oakington’s teachers and pupils in their use of technology. The days a started with a wonderfully harmonious song from  the Oakington Mass Choir conducted by Mr Francis. Ms Vanderpuye, Mr Newton and Mr Libson gave a talk about how we use technology to support the new computing curriculum. This was followed by a tour of the school.

The afternoon was filled with hands-on workshop  delivered by Lee Grahame from Data Harvest looking at E-Learn and Go. Computer Xplorers looking at Appshed, Mr Newton and some of the media team filming in 3D, The OMRN team interviewing  and Ms V and Mr Libson together with the coding champions were programming RedCandy, RedCurrent and Bluey.

 

Makey, Makeys are coming to Oakington

Makey Makey, what is a Makey Makey, I hear you ask? Well – simply FUN technology – Coming soon to Oakington!

Oakington is delighted to have been asked to participate in a really exciting project being run by  Gavin Summerfield from Heber Primary School and some of his partners in the project to engage children in technology in ways you would never have imagined a few years ago.

Makey Makeys are making children let their imagination run wild by using everyday items to create new and exciting technology tools to use in school, at home, everywhere!

Heber Primary School – Read about the project ‘Awesome Box’ Project

 

Nao Robot Maze Challenge

Mr Libson and Ms Vanderpuye over two days were in training on how to take their knowledge, skills and understanding of the Nao robots (RedCandy, RedCurrent and Bluey) to another level. Apart from simple robot behaviours, both members of staff, learned how to change the colour of the robot eyes, use the timeline to animate the robots and get the robots to make choices through asking questions,

The next activity was to work our how to get a blindfolded robot through a maze without touching it or moving it but giving it specific set of instructions in order to arrive at the end of the maze. This was challenging, however we worked it out simply by talking, trial and error. Mr Gavin Summerfield, Assistant Head from Heber Primary school joined us for day two of the training. John Pinkney our tutor was great in facilitating the two-day course giving us an opportunity to explore, experiment and answer the questions we wanted to ask about the robot behaviours.

 

 

Back to the Future- Robotics

Our long history of doing Control Technology project continues as we go ‘back to the future’. Memories of Lego Technic cities in the early 90s, controlled using COCO software  are no longer distant memories. In more recent years our pilot of the Lego Next Generation Robots in 2006 saw our children creating ‘Mindstorms’ procedures to control the NXT to play golf.All fascinating stuff!

In one year 5 control technology lesson using Flowol2, several boys and girls in particular showed a real aptitude for the concepts behind control technology, writing procedures and subroutines. This led to the desire to revive our once specialism by going back to the future with the Lego Wedo and NXT robots in our lunchtime Robotics club.

A brilliant group of boys and girls attend the sessions twice a week. Their first session was full of excitement and thirst for making their models.Some club rules had to be set before everyone got started on making their ‘Dancing Birds’ models as their first challenge.

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BETT 2012

The Bett Exhibition opened at Olympia from 11 – 14th January. A number of teachers including the ICT team went to the exhibition over three days.

Mrs Griffiths, Mrs Jabble and Ms Vanderpuye went on Friday 13th. As usual the annual exhibition was packed with teachers, headteachers, coordinators and anyone and everyone interested in technology in education. There was just so much to see. We were quite excited about getting inspiration for various new projects we have in the pipeline. Our task was clear, each of our teachers had tasks to complete whilst there.

First on our agenda when we got there was to go to the Naace stand to be presented with our ICT Mark award which the school received last term.On the way to the stand we got a little distracted with this amazing F1 type car simulation. It was brilliant, just to look at it… but before you could say..”F1 rocks!”…Mrs Griffiths had jumped in the car and was ready  to put her driving skills to the test, driving at speeds that went over 1000mph. The nice lady at the stand told her how to keep the car on the road making sure she watched the screen and when to press the red and blue buttons on the steering wheel. Once Mrs Griffiths got the hang of driving the car it was really hard to get her out of it…we were there for ages. I was jealous because time was running out at the presentation time was fast approaching. We said we would go back for me to have a go.

The Naace stand was packed with other schools also being presented with their ICT Mark awards. It was great

to see Oakington Manor’s name on the big screen. We were really pleased to see the headteacher from College Green Nursery and  Mrs Federico from Queen’s Park CLC who had both come to give a cheer for our school achievement. When our turn came Mrs Griffiths took photos and short video clips of our presentation.

The added bonus for our school was that Naace had announced on Thursday the people who had been shortlisted for the Naace Impact Awards 2012. Wow, Ms V was on the shortlist This is an award for making an impact on pupils and other people using ICT.

After the presentation we split up to go and look at different things. We later met up with Mrs Jabble. There was just so much to see. There were also lots of companies who knew our schools and had visited our website. We also heard from Webanywhere that they had received  enquiries from other schools about having their website built  because they were impressed with ours.

We saw a demonstration of the Van der Graaf Generator using a doll and other ways of generating electricity. If you’ve never seen this before the Van der Graff generator creates static electricity that makes your hair stand on end. It was great fun!

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