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the essence of humanity

The month of September seems to roll by fairly fast. Part of this is due to the nature of schools starting up in August and getting into a routine to chug along.

It also happened to be jam packed with couple of events that I'll outline in my blog post this month - Harrisburg School District Open Houses 9/11T (ES), 9/12W (MS), 9/13R (HS - SciTech had their open house on their opening day of 8/13M), the District-wide Cougar's Got Talent show on 9/14F, and the Professional Development opportunity of visiting the World Maker Faire in Flushing Meadow Queens, NY. These events helped to reinforce this year's Foundry Makerspace 2018-19 (3) Strategic Priorities:

1) CHANGE the narrative;

2) CHAMPION excellence;

3) CHARGE our base.

As the projects at John Harris and SciTech ramp up, these (3) Strategic Priorities will continue to surface connecting to capacity building within the school community. The first and second items flow through the partnership of fellows / teachers in STEAM project based learning within the schools. The third is something that fellows continue to build by encouraging students, teachers, parents, admin, and the community at large. The later was charged through the visit to the 2018 World Maker Faire, which I cover at the bottom of this blog post.

 

STEAM Making @ John Harris Campus High School

ARTS:

Cougar's Got Talent (Mr. Williams, Mr. Burns, Mr. Elo, Mr. Green)

Mr. Williams as the MC.

The Cougar’s Got Talent event was an important event that was conceived to be more than a start of school pep rally. It featured local students as the talent, but there were also John Harris and SciTech students running the equipment. The two and a half hour event was well received. I helped to set up on Thursday and Friday afternoon. It was good to see Mr. Burns and Mr. Williams working with SciTech folks Mr. Elo and Mr. Green. This was due to Shawn Olivera being out of vacation, which he was returning back on Friday afternoon before the start of the show. Through the event, students captured the acts on 4 HD cameras and a DSLR. The hope was to use this event as a training situation to show how productions are made. Later in the month the AV Studio, STEM Lab, and SciTech Digital Media classes would use the raw footage to create an overview film. It can also be used as a training segment to show the roles in recording a video production. Students could use the Newtek Tricaster in the AV Studio as well as Adobe Premiere or Elements, or Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve 15. This is a free program that is extremely powerful and free for students to download. The students in the Media Tech class were working to make trailers of each of the participants, however that wasn’t achieved before the day of the show. They used Apple’s iMove to complete these tasks because of its built in trailer feature.

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS:

STEM Lab (Mr. Gigac)

The STEM Lab portable green screen.

Mr. Gigac started this year with having students learn the basics of using the digital cameras and built in webcam on their computers. This became a way to teach students how to document their projects during the school year. This took about 3 weeks to complete. During this time Mr. Gigac and Shawn Olivera sorted out issues within the STEM Lab images and DeepFreeze. Mr. Gigac had the students start out with Windows Movie Maker, but wanted to use Adobe Elements that provided more options. He thought that this was a better idea than using Adobe Premiere. While this is industry standard software, the learning curve is extremely high. There was also some interest in installing Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve 15.

The other idea that Mr. Gigac had was to build a green screen backdrop using 1” PVC piping and green felt. He had students work in groups to design a frame that would hold the green felt. This took about a week and provided good results. Students had to figure out the view size of the webcam and get the right size of the frame. Mr. Gigac had the students sketch out there ideas, and only one or two students achieved this task. When the green screen was completed, I showed the students how to use the Chroma Key feature in Adobe Premiere.

 

STEAM Making @ SciTech Campus High School

TECHNOLOGY:

SciBots (Mrs. Worful, Mr. Group, Mr. Green)

On Tuesday, 9/11 the SciTech SciBots Robotics Club officially started. The students finished the competition field in two weeks - 9/21. They are going through the 4 Phases of Design It, Build It, Program It, and Drive It as outlined by the FIRST Tech Challenge Model - Game Information - Game Launch Video For information about last year's competition, feel free to visit my 170930 Blog Post - Time Nurturing.

Mr.s Worful updates the SciBots Robotics Calendar.

The 4th Floor SciTech Robotics Classrooms.

The Competition Dates are:

FRC Off-Season Competition

Wissahickon High School Lower Cafeteria

521 Houston Rd Ambler, PA 19002

Oxford Area High School Gymnasium

705 Waterway Rd Oxford, PA 19363

Wissahickon Middle School Gymnasium

500 Houston Rd Ambler, PA 19002

Oxford Area High School Gymnasium

705 Waterway Rd Oxford, PA 19363

Penn State York

Joe and Rosie Ruhl Student Community Center

Irving Ave York, PA 17403

3/2/19S & 3/3/19U - Championship Tournament Pennsylvania

FTC Championship

TBA

TBA

ARTS:

Podcasting (Mr. Elo)

Mr. Elo has been working with his Journalism Class to start a school podcast. He had students pair up and create a draft 2-5 minute podcast. The students had to write a script and record it using Audacity. Through the process it was noticed that students needed some training in basic audio quality. I sent Mr. Elo a couple of links to Audacity manuals and guides as well as Youtube videos. Mr. Elo was using this process as a means to start digital storytelling in the school. He saw this as a way to help strengthen the journalistic approach to SciTech’s morning announcements.

Helpful links for Audacity can be found here:

Buzzsprout - Podcasting 101 - Audacity Tutorial: 17 Essential Podcast Recording & Editing Tips

TechNorms - How to Create & Edit Podcasts

 

So in the area of CHARGING THE BASE, I was blessed with the opportunity to attend the World Maker Faire in Queens, NY for a third year. For reference and comparison to my overview of the 2017 World Maker Faire, see my 170930 Blog Post - Time Nurturing. My first trip to the World Maker Faire happened in October of 2016. This was mentioned in my 161031 Blog Post - The Maker and the Glean.

On Thursday evening, September 20, I made the annual trek up to Queens, NY. I was grateful that I had an extra day to attend the Make: Education Forum. https://makerfaire.com/new-york/education-forum/ For the past two years, I was not able to make it to the Education Forum. In some of my discussions last year, a few people asked if I had attended the forum because there was talk about connecting to urban education. I was talking about issues of cost and access for public schools. The discussion seemed to be under the radar.

As with last year I returned from the Maker Faire, extremely exhausted, but with a clearer, more urgent grasp on TIME and why we exist to facilitate the nurturing of the next generation of makers.

Rob’s Make: Education Forum Highlights Friday 9/20:

12:30 PM Lunch

3:30 PM - Brad Halsey, Building Momentum – Solving Hard Problems in Challenging Situations - Two ideas to solve from Brad’s work with disaster relief - 1) Portable Traffic Lights, 2) Water Level Indicator for Flooded Areas

Rob's World Maker Faire Highlights Saturday 9/22:

Rob's World Maker Faire Highlights Sunday 9/24:

01:30 PM = [College and Making] Making Makers @ MIT Chris Peterson - https://makerfaire.com/maker/entry/68262/

 

EPILOGUE:

One item that I wasn't able to attend was the 1st Annual Harrisburg University eSports Festival called HUEFest. It is worth noting this because of the global exploding of eSports interest. At the World Maker Faire, I mentioned to my AirBnB roommate that HU was hosting an eSports event for League of Legends and Overwatch. His game was Overwatch, and it is very popular within the students I talk with at the John Harris and SciTech campuses. I continue to ask, why can't we have a high school team to unite the high schools.

If you are a sceptic, please feel free to check out this 170926 PDF from the Nelson Company's Nelson eSports division. I've provided some images to provide some context.

The eSports Playbook, Nelson Esports, p. 6

The eSports Playbook, Nelson Esports, p. 6

"The immense popularity of survival-based games like Fortnite, growing prize pools for eSports tournaments, the rise of live-streaming, and improving infrastructure for pro leagues have all paved the way for eSports to reach 300 million viewers by 2022, on par with NFL leadership today"

There is a lot of conflicting data about the audience/view numbers, and this is getting sorted out. On 180301, Good Rebels on Medium.com provided a good overview of the importance in the article, eSports is a multibillion dollar industry that everyone wants a piece of. We'll help you understand it. For deeper knowledge, see ESPN's 150522 article, Resistance is futile: eSports is massive...and growing. Forbes been trying to understand the economic status of the industry (180711 How Much Can the eSports Market Grow In 2018?.)

Why is it important to follow?

"For many businesses in media and entertainment, eSports offers a way to reach a demographic that’s been increasingly beyond their grasp.

In general, players and fans are younger,

less likely to watch linear TV, and often less interested in professional sports than the population as a whole."

HUEFest Food Truck Street, image by Chad Frey
HUEFest Music Stage, image by Chad Frey
HUEFest Gaming, image by Chad Frey


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