project – Learning Signs

The Family of Twilight (French 2 Project)

September 9, 2018 Dad littlesister, school

Rachel, who is now a 9th grader, created this poster over the weekend for a geneology project assigned in her French 2 class at Casady.

The Family of Twilight by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr

“The Family of Twilight” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

She wrote and typed the script she will share in class tomorrow, and agreed to audio record it for me with English translations tonight. (And she agreed to let me publish it here on our family learning blog!) Here’s the recording as a narrated image, it’s 2 minutes and 12 seconds long:

This project was recorded with a quick app smash on my iPhone. I used:

The free app PhotoScan by Google Photos (to scan the poster)
The free app Squaready (to save the rectangular photo as a square image)
The free app Voice Record Pro (to record the audio and export the narrated image as a video to the iPhone camera roll)
The free app YouTube (to upload the video to my YouTube channel)

Check out more of Rachel’s projects and work on RachelFryer.com. We still have that WordPress instance set to cross-post from Learning Signs, when her “category” on the blog is selected. At some point in the not-too-distance future I’m betting she’ll want to do a redesign of the site and rebrand it. (She’s recently changed both her Twitter and Instagram channel names, for example.) When she does hopefully I’ll persuade her to maintain / keep / archive all her old work and media projects.

Learn more about creating narrated image / narrated art projects like this on ShowWithMedia.com.

Leave a comment class, french, project, twilight

Good Things Can Come From Science and Engineering Projects in School

April 30, 2012 Dad school, science

(Cross-posted from Moving at the Speed of Creativity)

This weekend, my 8th grade son and I worked on a project for his science class he’s been planning for over a month. In March I asked him to record a short podcast we posted over on our family learning blog, “Draft Design for a Complex Machine to Generate Electricity from Water Power.” This was his initial design:

listen to ‘A Complex Machine Design’ on Audioboo

After actually building his planned design and working with different materials (largely scrap wood from our local Lowe’s hardware store and various bits of hardware pieced together with a drill and Gorilla Glue) we finally created a product which resembles this design, which he drew tonight.

Last night, he recorded a three minute video explaining his design and what we’d changed from the original plans.

Today, he actually tested the design and we recorded two videos I combined into one: A preliminary failure and a second successful test.

Overall science class this year for him has been (I think) largely a disappointment and a big frustration on several fronts. I won’t elaborate here in detail, but it’s been a case as a parent where I dearly wished there were more opportunities for both student and parental feedback to be integrated into the formal teacher evaluation process. Those frustrations aside, I want to observe that good things can come from projects and specifically engineering challenges which students are given. We spend far too LITTLE time in school and outside of class actually BUILDING THINGS we design and tweaking those models until “they work.” Alexander’s project isn’t likely to win any STEM awards and I’m not even sure what his grade on the project or in his class will be… but those things really don’t matter much. What matters is this science and engineering project gave him a chance to design and build something he imagined in his mind. It gave us a chance to work on building his design together. It was fun, and I think we both learned some new things as well as creating something we’re proud of and will remember for a long time.

He takes his project to school tomorrow to show his teacher and his class what he made and what he learned. “Success in learning,” however, has already been achieved and we don’t need a teacher’s grade or evaluation to know it. We DID, however, need a teacher to assign this project and thereby provide a catalyst for designing and building together. For that I am thankful both to his teacher and his wonderful school, Classen School of Advanced Studies in Oklahoma City Public Schools.

Long live science and engineering projects for students which require creativity, imagination, and really “making stuff!”