THANK YOU

Thank you so much to all the Micklefield staff and others for allowing us to do this amazing project, it was an amazing experience and we all loved it!

  

Thank You- Thomas Bennet, Kim and Laura

We had two skype sessions with Thomas Bennet, Kim and Laura, which we learnt a lot from.  Thomas Bennet organized Kim and Laura to be there to answer our questions, in the second skype session he showed us the control  for the telescopes.

We are so grateful that they gave up their valuabletime to answer our questions!

A Trailer For Our Finished Movie

We made a trailer for our movie yesterday, we also made this on imovie but using the trailer option instead of the movie option.  It is more about us than the project the opposite to the movie.

This is our awesome trailer:

Ms Whizz- We couldn't have done it without her

Ms Whizz is the best computer teacher in the world, she was the one who organized this project and allowed us to do all the the things we have on this blog and much more.  She has put so much effort into this project even if we don't realize it, she had to convince our principle and all the other teachers to let her pick a class to do this with, we are all so happy that she chose our class.  We think she is the most awesome teacher and we are very privalaged to have her as a teacher. 

Nobody in the world could have a better computer teacher.

Thank you so much MS Whizz!

Our Movie Trailer

Today is our last day and we've decided to make a movie trailer for our Just Blend I.T movie. We are all gonna be in our trailer and we are gonna make the best movie trailer you have ever seen. We are having so much fun. Thanks for reading are blog.

'Just Blend I.T' coming soon to this blog and 'You Tube'.

Our Finished Movie

We have our movie which we spent the last few days working on.
This is it:

Second day of movie making

Today we are doing are movie again. We're having trouble since our teacher is sick at home and thank goodness we aren't having technical problems or we'd be in big trouble. Our movies are going well and we having lots of fun with it. We are making are movie on imovie with are iPad. We have learned to input are own music and its taking a long time but we'll get it done. Thanks for reading are blog, hope you had fun.

Movie- about our project

For the rest of this project we will be making a movie on what we have learnt in this project, it will include information about the tasks we have done and the difficulties we had and it will include somthing about the programs and devices we used.  We will be making ours on iMovie but we could have done it on any movie making program.

We will show them to our parents at our open evening along with these blogs which will be printed out onto big A3 pieces pf paper.

Our second Skype session:

On Friday we had a second Skype session where Thomas Bennet showed us the control centre. He showed us the screen where the health of the telescopes are displayed. He also introduced us to his boss and some of the other board members. We also got to ask some more questions that were answered by the two scientists: Kim and Laura. We asked them how it was to be a woman in the project. They said that they were equal to everybody else and that it was very exciting to be in a project that is going to make such a difference, they also said that they had worked very hard to get to this point. It is interesting to know that only 50 years ago women were not allowed and not considered capable of  being able to be a good scientist or mathematition. Look now, women are one of the main brain power sources. The Skyping was very interesting here is a video of the control centre:

Fiona Beal

On Thrsday we had a special guest from Schoolnet to come and watch our Skyping session. Her name was Fiona Beal. She watched our Skype and was surprised at the level of knowledge we were at.She enjoyed her visit and liked the way we were using technology. She said that we have no idea what it was like before te internet. This is a picture of us and our divices after our Skyping session, Fiona is on the right:

Our First Skype Session

 

Today we skyped three scientists who are working on the SKA MeerKat project. We had a whole lot of questions for the scientists. I think we understand about this project a lot more than we did before this Skype session. It was so cool skyping professional scientists. You can find our questions in a post before and see what questions you can answer and then comment with the number of the question. Good luck and have fun.
 Enjoy the video!!

 

 



Our Art Project- Drawing Aliens on our Devices

For art we had to design a caracter for a cometition hosted by Cartoon Network to make a new character for the television series Adventure Time.  We did them on our devices using drawing apps or programs but later we will have to draw them on paper for the competition.
These are ours:

Jordyn's alien!

Bella's alien!

Emma's alien!

Laura's alien!  They are called Bay and Boo.

You Tube

You Tube

 

Today we made a song about the Meerkat project so we decided to do it to the tune of the song Clouds by Zach Sobiech. Please watch are video and tell all your friends about us. Thanks for reading our blog. Hope you had fun.

 

 



THANKS FOR LISTENING!!!

Bellas and Jordyns MeerKAT presentation

We had to make a powerpoint on what we knew on the MeerKAT SKA project. We then had to upload it to slide share to get a Embed code so we could upload it here. We had difficulties uploading it because it was saved in the wrong file format we managed to work that out by ourselves and then we uploaded it here:

The Meerkat Project

The Meerkat project

 

Today in class we had to do a PowerPoint on the Meerkat telescope project. We found out about new and exciting things that is happening right now in South Africa. Check out the SKA project and you will get a peek in to the future. South Africa is very lucky to be chosen to have the SKA project to be built here. Part of it is been built in Australia. They chose us because of are climate and they needed a place where there's no technology(like the Karoo where the telescope is being built) so a radio wave cant set off the telescopes. I don't want to spoil it for you, so find our PowerPoint at Meerkat project Emma. R and Laura.

By Emma and Laura

Twitter Debate

On our devices(phones, tablets, ipads and laptops) we were all having a debate( on twitter) with eachother as Ms Whizz(our awesome computer teacher) had asked the question 'Will the MeerKAT SKA project find alien life', some people said 'it would as there are so many galaxies out there and that one of them must contain life and the telescopes will be so powerful that they will find alien life' whereas some people disagreed, they said 'it might find some find planets which aliens could live on them'(water and  gasses) some people said that they didn't know and some people said 'aliens don't exist'.  Some people had a debate going on but some people didn't as no one seemed to want to debate with them but they tried to debate with others.

Bella and Jordyn's QUESTIONS about the Meerkat SKA poject

We are going to be asking Thomas Bennet some questions on the Meerkat SKA project.

1. What is the differance between the types of telescopes and their jobs that     are going to be used?
2. How do the telescopes turn radio waves into information?
3. What are they going to be trying to find the answers to?
4. What is Einsteins theory of reletivity?
5. What is so important about using radio waves and not anything else?
6. How does the information get from the telescope to where they read it?
7. How does the how does the Meerkat project fit into SKA?
8. What is the gregorian offset dish?
9. How do the telescopes connect to make one big telescope?
10. What do the small telescopes look for?
11. What do the medium sized telescopes look for?
12. What do the big telescopes look for?
13. How will you find out about planets which have been destroyed?
14. Why are the governments putting so much money into this project?
15. Why is it called a square kilometre array?
16. Do the different telescopes look for different things in the universe?

 

Meerkat Telescope Project Questions

In class today we had to think up some questions to Skype professors and ask them about the meerkat project. These are our questions:

1.  Why did you choose South Africa and Australia for your project?

2.  What are you trying to find out?

3.  How far away is the  closest star?

4. Why are you spending so much money on the project?

5.  What are you hoping to find?

6.  How long will this project take?

7.  Is there life in space?

8.  What is a radio telescope?

9.   Why did they name it the meerkat project?

10. How does it work?

11. When will the project be finished?

By Emma R and Laura

Xhosa Poem- ESkolweni

Our first Xhosa lesson using blended learning:
We had to get together with the rest of the members of our groups which we are doing these blogs with. We had the option of videoing a oral( which we did earlier this year or a poem which we did last year, our group chose to do the poem called 'Eskolweni'(school). This is ours:

We had great difficulty trying to upload it, as we had filmed it on an ipad but could not upload it on an ipad, so one of us sends a web address which doesn't exist to another, we eventually solved our problem by putting the video on the school dropbox and downloading it onto one of the laptops and then uploading it to this blog.
We may not have known how to this when we tried the first time but each time we tried we got closer getting it right, as our computer teacher Ms Whizz says 'this problem is an exeriment and we won't do anything the first time but we will learn how to do it' and this is what we did.

Our Xhosa poem - Eskolweni

In Xhosa we had to make a video and email it to our Xhosa teacher. This is our Xhosa poem called Eskolweni.

Our first Task:
Our first task was to make a fake twitter account on a website called twister. The account had to be of someone who made space history. The person had to make a tweet describing what they had just done in a clever way e.g. Neil Armstrong- one small leap for man and one giant leap for man kind. The username of the person also had to be clever e.g. Neil Armstrong- Moonwalker. We had to add a date that would, if twitter was around in those days, be accurate. Our group chose Isaac Newton:

Sucked to the Earth and Held in place. Nothing can drift away, with that theory you should feel quite safe.

10-06-1687 via Tweetdeck

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FallingApple Isaac Newton

In we go!😃

On Thursday we brought our beanbags, fat sacks, ottomens, cushions and blankets to make our science room as comfy as possible and fun to learn in. On Friday we settled in and set up all our accounts. We will be using twitter, Skype and gmail. We are going to have so much fun. 😃