Packing up

On Thursday the 20th it was a very sad day. It was packing up time which meant our cool,awesome Just Blend IT room had to disappear. We took everything we moved in we had to move out and everything we moved out had to come back in. The Just Blend IT room went back to the old boring Science room. All of the using of the technology was gone and it was back to using books and test tubes. But it has been a wonderful experience.

Our Poem-Come lets explore!

Our Poem-Come lets explore!

Jemma's Alien

Jemma's alien
Done by Jemma on Alice's computer

Movie Making

During the movie making experience we went all around the school taking pictures and videos of people and what they were doing. We have been on the field and the Just Blend IT room to take videos of each other. We each got a turn to vide someone else.

Amaarah's Animation Generation

Amaarah A's Amimation Generation picture

Alice's Animation Generation

This is Alice's Animation Generation Picture.

Mariam's Animation Generation!

Olivia the Space Rhino!

Squishy the Space Jellyfish!

 

 Firebolt, a piece from the sun!

 Geoffrey the Star!

 

Come on Lets explore

Come on lets Explore 

Lets learn more about the awe

Of the galaxies

And with the help of technology 

We can know meteorology

It's in the stars

SKA lets us look out so far

Out to space

And when we go to the moon 

We can explore the earth soon

By Jemma,Alice,Amaarah E and  Mariam

Skype

We skyped with people that were involved in the Meerkat Project to ask questions about the project. When we were about to call them, they called us!

Their names are Thomas Bennet:

 Kim:

 and Laura:

Thomas showed us the office!

 

 

He also showed us the health of the radio telescope. The purple part means that something is wrong with it and they are going to fix it.

 

 

They are constructing this massive building to house their computing facilities and process data and signals in the Karoo.

 

 

 They explained well:

 

 

We also shared our laughs together!

 

 

We had lots of fun!

 

 

What we have learnt about Skype

we have learnt a lot about our planet and solar system through the Skype call with Thomas, Kim and Laura. We learnt that the nearest black hole in our galaxy is 27 000 light years away. However don't worry, it won't suck earth in! to be a scientist or mathematician or astronomer you must e a curious person and always try to solve the problem. You must always be creative and imaginative and always ask why? It takes about ten hours to drive from here to the place in the Karoo where the telescopes are. They ARE BUILDING A HUGE BUILDING to store all their data about the telescopes. if the internet goes down, then the data is safe but the webcams just wouldn't be able to see the telescope for a short while. the Big Bang Theory is the theory that once the universe was very small and now it is big. The job opportunities they have in this project is an astronomer, scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses or you can just marry these jobs together if you are good at two of them.

Why are women lucky today?

As a woman, we are so lucky today because women and men have equal opportunities in jobs.  Fifty years ago, women couldn't do important jobs. When our teacher went to school, you could study Maths and Science but you could never be the top student at these subjects. If you are into Computers, Maths and Science then GO FOR IT, JOIN THE MEERKAT PROJECT, FOLLOW YOUR HEART! If you study Maths, you could get amazing careers. When we are older, we can work for the Meerkat Project!

Amaarah's animation generation designs

These are some of my designs for the Animation Generation Competition

MeerKat Array Chat

On the 13th of July we spoke to 3 special people who knew a lot about space on Skype. We asked them most of our questions about the MeerKAT project and learned a lot more about this project. One of the questions are: Why is this project called the "MeerKAT" Project? and was answered: It was originally called the cat array, then when the South African government had more money to build more telescopes the called it the MeerKAT Array, Meer meaning more. This experience has been really wonderful.

 

This is a Skype video of when we took a tour of the operation room with Thomas Bennet:

 

 

Alice & Jemma's SKA powerpoint

Steven our computer technician

Whenever you work with technology, something goes wrong. If you have experienced this, you will know that this is VERY ANNOYING! Luckily, Micklefield has a computer technician named Steven. He is the best in business. He always helps the girls when something goes wrong and fixes it! He has been a big help to us. What would we do without him?

Meerkat Project Powerpoint

We have made a powerpoint showing our questions that we have posted and the answers to them. We have enjoyed changing colours, fonts, animations, designs, layouts and other things! We have put this on slideshare. You can see our work by clicking on these links:

 

 

 

Twitter

On the 12th of June, we brought our phones to school. Before we started Blend I.T learning, we had to download Twitter. We used our phones and we didn't know much about Twitter. Ms Whizz, our amazing teacher taught us how to tweet to people and the difference between a hashtag and an @ symbol. An @ symbol is when you are talking about someone and you want them to see what you are tweeting about them. A hashtag helps to identify a keyword for people looking for certain types of messages. If you type #justblendit on Twitter, you can see our class discussion. We had to relate our thoughts about whether the Meerkat project will find life out in space and support our answer. The majority of the class said that the project will find life out in space. We had to choose someone and agree or disagree with their tweet by tweeting back to them. They then replied, agreeing or disagreeing with us. We learnt how to send tweets to more than one person.

Our Twister

We had to make a fake Twitter called "Twister". Our group did Albert Einstein:

Now that you've seen our Twister, I'm sure you would like to know how to make a Twister. Well it's pretty easy:

1. Click on www.classtools.net/twister
2.Type the information asked...click submit.
3.Use the snipping tool if you would like to save it.
You can search the other things that the website has to offer such as Fakebook which is the fake version of Facebook.
Have fun tweeting!

Alice's Quizzical Questions

1. What are you hoping to find by making the SKA telescopes?
2. Do you think there is other life in distant places?
3. Which countries are contributing to this project?
4. Are these countries donating?
5. Can Black Holes come close enough to swallow planets in our galaxy?
6. Is it possible to be swallowed by a black hole and then come out?

Mariam and Amaarah's Questions about the Meerkat and SKA Project:

What is the difference between normal telescopes and radio telescopes?
How big are the radio telescopes?
How many years are there in a light year?
What makes the SKA so special?
How does the SKA work?
When will the SKA be built?
How does the Meerkat telescope fit into SKA?
Why is this project called the "Meerkat" Project?
How many telescopes have been built so far?
Why did they choose Africa and Australia?
How does radio-active waves contribute to this project?
What will the radio telescopes be trying to find out in Space?
What is anti-matter?

Jemma's Brainy questions on the SKA Meerkat project

Do you think there's life out there in Space? When you get all the information what will you do with it? What is the difference between Meerkat and SKA? Will the Telescopes still be intact throughout natural disasters?

Xhosa Video

 

Twister

On Monday the 10th the whole class in groups made a twister. It was so much fun. We had to choose a famous scientist to do it on .My group chose Albert Einstein.You had to make up a name for the person ,say their real name a little bit about that person ,something funny and the date that the person was around.Some people did Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton.Some people called Galileo Mr Sun.

Xhosa

Today the 11th of June we made a xhosa video.We could choose between doing the xhosa oral or the eskolweni poem. IT was really fun and really funny because we thought we could do it with any partner but we couldn't so we had to do it with our group partners and e had to record it again.We also have to put our xhosa poems on You-tube and on to our blogs.

Meerkat Project

The meerkat project is a project where they are going to build 64 telescopes in the Karoo. They had to choose two crountries to build the telescopes. A dad in our school is also apart of this project.Close to 100 young scientist and engeneers are working on this project.These telescopes will be the largest and most sensitive telescopes in the world.The two crountries that they chose were South Africa and Australia.

Art project-animation generation

In art we are doing something really exciting...we are entering a competition and we have to design our very own cartoon character for a television programme called Adventure Time. Our theme is space. We hall have really good and creative ideas and we could win a lot of money for our school and possibly an i-Pad for ourselves!


If you possibly want to enter this competition, you can watch this video of on of the episodes of Adventure Time to learn more about the characters and the style of the show:

 

What we are going to do

We had to create a blog as part of the experiment. All of our work will go no the blog and we will be marked on this work. We will also be making movies, slideshows and many more exciting things. We will be using many different programmes to record all of our work. We are also taking lots of pictures of all of our developments and improvements.

Space Creation

This experiment is so exciting so far. On Thursday we had to set-up our creative thinking room. We have fat sacks, roller chairs, carpets, blankets and lots of cushions. We have set-up Gmail accounts. Skype accounts and Twitter accounts. We have used many of our Habits Of Minds and have learnt so much about communicating properly.

 

 you can now watch a video of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon!