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Listed under:  Arts  >  Design
Listed under:  Technologies  >  Design
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Balancing Sculptures

This activity invites students to explore balance and stability by designing and building whimsical kinetic sculptures that tilt, slide, and suspend everyday objects and ordinary materials into surprising arrangements. Students explore stability, centres of gravity, balanced forces and symmetry through this hands-on, tactile ...

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Cardboard Automata

This activity invites students to explore simple mechanical elements such as cams, levers, and linkages, while creating a moving sculpture. This activity is simple to start but may become more and more complex as students become familiar with possible motions and imagine ways to artistically decorate their contraption. ...

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Cranky Contraptions

This activity invites students to make Cranky Contraptions, kinetic sculptures that animate a character or scene when a handle is turned. These automata are powered by a simple crank slider mechanism which provides the basic motion. Everyday materials around can be repurposed into these contraptions. The activity includes ...

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Exploring AR Space Rocks

In this lesson, students undertake a research project about “space rocks”. They devise a research question to investigate something they would like to know about space rocks and communicate their ideas within an AR or Virtual Reality (VR) experience.

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AR Solar System with Metaverse

In this lesson, students explore our Solar System in Augmented Reality (AR). Students start by exploring a set of AR flashcards that present the Sun and Planets in our Solar System and then go on to use the Metaverse App to create their own AR solar system experience based on research.

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Home automation: General purpose programming

Investigate home automation systems, including those powered by artificial intelligence (AI) with speech recognition capability. These suggested activities for year levels 7-8 are designed for students using general purpose programming languages JavaScript and Python, with similar content to the visual coding lesson Home ...

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Home automation with AI

Home automation is all the rage. You talk to your mobile phone to control the lights, the fan, the air conditioner, or your pool pump. But how does it work? In this lesson, we explore the AI that could power a home automation system.

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Lilypad Personalised Alert Buzzer

In this lesson students will create a personalised musical buzzer by programming the LilyPad Arduino to play a sound using the Main board, Buzzer and Button, coding the note frequency in Arduino IDE. The lesson can be extended to include LED’s that light up or flash according to the note played to enable the buzzer to be ...

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Sphero young inventors

In this lesson students will explore the use of Sphero in the everyday world by adding accessories to invent solutions to workplace or other problems or simply by inventing an adaptation to the device. In each case, they are to build the accessory and create the code required for the device to serve a particular purpose. ...

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Coding for GUIs Lesson 2: Controls for input

This is the second in a series of lessons to incorporate graphical user interfaces (GUIs) into your general-purpose programming. The series follows on from the Visual To Text Coding lesson series.

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Light up soft toy with LilyPad

This project will explore two ways of controlling the flow of current to a LED using a button and switch. No programming is initially expected in this project, however once students are comfortable with connecting or sewing their circuits and attaching lights, a follow-up project that involves using a pre built Arduino ...

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Coding for GUIs Lesson 1: Structure, style and function

This is the first in a series of lessons to incorporate Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) into your General Purpose Programming. It follows on from the Visual To Text Coding lesson series.

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Sphero Invent a Game

This lesson will explore how to program the Sphero using functions and show the benefits of decomposing the behaviour of the Sphero into functions, instead of writing line by line repeated behaviours. This lesson idea was created by Celia Coffa.

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Coding a sentimental chatbot in Python

Incorporating 11 tutorial videos and two informative lecture videos, this learning sequence explores natural language processing, a significant application of artificial intelligence. Teachers and students are led through the coding in Python of a chatbot, a conversational program capable of responding in varied ways to ...

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Weather forecast from the stratosphere

This lesson sequence is designed to introduce students to data analysis using a spreadsheet such as MS Excel. The project is based on a real world problem and a real data set from a weather balloon launched in Australia earlier this year. The project consists of 5 lessons of variable length, each with a different focus. ...

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Transportation Though the Ages: Science as a human endeavour

Humans are constantly working to develop and improve our technology and understanding. This resource provides step-by-step instructions to help students consider why innovative design and improvement is important. Students firstly identify as many types of transport they can think of and then discuss why new types of transport ...

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Travel Times

Life would be very different today if we did not have modern transport. In this activity, students calculate the time it would take for humans to travel long distances through different modes of transport. They then analyse the impact of these technological developments.

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Landline: Drones and bugs

We don't normally associate robotics with farming but, in fact, robotics have revolutionised farming and agriculture in recent years. Find out how some strawberry farmers are using drones to disperse 'good' bugs for pest control management. Can you think of some other ways drones could be used to help farmers?

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Creating art and meaning from waste

Welcome to Marina DeBris's exhibition, "Beach Couture: A Haute Mess". How would you describe Marina's art? What are the ideas she communicates through her artworks? How do the processes, materials and techniques Marina works with contribute to the creation of meaning in her art? Do you agree with Marina's belief that art ...

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Engineering clean rivers

Figuring out how to clean up contaminated rivers is a big challenge. It's also tricky to work out where the most contaminated parts of a river system are and whether its fish are safe to eat. Watch this video and learn how engineering has helped to solve these problems. Why do you think engineers looked to the bottom of ...