The social committee of Springfield Middle School is hosting a holiday door decoration contest, much to my horror. I am not a crafty person (unless the idea comes from Pinterest - with step by step directions, I can create anything!). I had a brainstorm of inspiration one night though, while staring at some old equipment that needs to go to recycling.... wait for it... Very punny, right?? Whomp whomp whoommmppp... I'm sure I saw it on a commerical somewhere. I have very few original ideas, let's be honest. This idea of "Tech The Halls" was going to include a Christmas tree with some decorations that were old CDs and mice that I had laying around. When my enrichment coding class heard that I was going to "just" put some paper and CDs on my door, they took it upon themselves to build the most epic door ever. Behold: TECH THE HALLS! It's awesome, right? I know, it's a little overwhelming. Let me show you up close how fabulous this door really is... 1. QR CODES The Christmas balls that you see on the tree each contain a QR code. Each code leads the viewer to a YouTube video of a different holiday song. There are 16 total... LOOK! 2. UPCYCLED KEYBOARD KEYS The garland on the tree is made out of old keyboard keys that I let the kids rip up and hot glue to string - and they even decided to spell out holiday words! They included: Merry Christmas, Rudolph, Santa, Joy to the World, Giving, Presents, and more! 3. INTERACTIVITY My students, being the budding programmers that they are, decided that they HAD to make the door interactive. They grabbed our Makey Makey kits (click here for a previous blog post about them) and coded a program in Scratch that allows the user to touch the doorknob and the foil above it to make the door SING. That's right... the door actually SINGS! These very creative kids ran the wires behind the door so that the user completes the circuit by touching both the doorknob and the foil above it: Here is a picture of the magic that runs the show (and the magicians behind it!): You can see the wiring on the door attached to the Makey Makey. The kids set up the laptop to not go to sleep when the lid is shut, then wrote the program to play one of three random versions of Deck the Halls when the circuit is completed: Genius, I know! I take no credit for any of this work, it was totally designed and implemented by students. Bravo to these intrepid engineers!
Interested in getting some Makey Makeys for your classroom or library? Check out their website for all kinds of ideas on how to implement them into the curriculum! Comment below on how you could use these fun tools with your students!
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In an ongoing effort to put books in the hands of kids, I decided to run a FaceSwap contest during the month of December. Face-swapping is an option in Snapchat, and there are several apps out there that allow users to swap faces. The challenge for the library was to FaceSwap with a book! Biographies are easiest of course, but there are several Fiction and Everybody books that made for some great FaceSwaps. To encourage entries, I am giving away a SweetFrog gift card for each winner. There are contests for 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, and teachers/staff! Here are some of our hilarious entries below... once you're done laughing, go make one of your own! The library hosted our 2nd annual bookmark contest during the month of November. Students could enter their original artwork between 11/1 and 11/17. Voting opened on 11/18 and ran through 11/30. All bookmarks featured below will be printed in full-color and available for students to take. Congratulations to our winners - HERE THEY ARE! 6th Grade7th Grade8th Grade |
About the AuthorHi! Welcome to my blog! My name is Christine Hurley. This is my 17th year of teaching - I've taught Kindergarten, 4th grade, elementary media, and now I am in my 6th year of teaching middle school media! Archives
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