18th March – screening at art gene gallery!

To finish off the project, all the pupils and teachers who took part in the project came to a special screening at Art Gene Gallery on 18th March. It was a great opportunity for everyone to view the work that took place at the different schools, and for all the pupils to receive certificates to recognise their hard work!

Here are some photos from the event:

Lunch at Art Gene

Watching the presentations

Greengate with their certificates

A big round of applause for everybody!

Since we saw them last, many of these Barrow Scratchers had been busy showing their friends, families and even their teachers how to make presentations, movies and games!

Thanks to:
Staff and pupils at Barrow Island Community Primary School, St. James C of E Junior School, Ormsgill Primary School and Greengate Junior School
Rachel Holmes
Art Gene Gallery
Neutral Spoon

Post-production stage

I re-programmed all the individual projects so that they ran as animations, then joined the projects from each school together to make four separate presentations (linked below). The great thing about Scratch is that you can download the source files of all of the projects uploaded to the site. This means that it’s easy to keep learning by studying other people’s code or even “remixing” projects.

Happy Scratching!

Barrow Island Community Primary School

St. James’ C of E Junior School

Ormsgill Primary School

Greengate Junior School

february 13th in barrow

Last – but by no means least! – was Greengate Junior School on February 13th.

The group worked hard to develop their ideas:

Greenhouse

Party shed

And then got to grips with turning those ideas into (virtual) “reality”:

Working things out

Helping each other

It was great to hear that some of them has been so inspired by our previous visit that they’d already downloaded Scratch and started using it at home. I also heard that a couple of dads were getting in on the act as well, and were busily programming Scratch Pong!

The Greengate group came up with some clever and engaging ideas – here are a couple of unedited projects. Check out the “sun/moon” switch and the exciting new performance stage!

NB: Most of the projects created in the workshops were interactive. Click the green flag to start. You may then have to click on sprites or press keys to trigger the action.

Stage

Sun and moon

Well done everybody!

february 12th in barrow

On February 12th we spent the day at Ormsgill Primary School.

Here are some photos of the project plans:

Alien teachers

Playground or fairground?

Here are some photos of the group:

Figuring it out

Working on the projects

This group had some really creative ideas – from ferris wheels and trampolines to crazy “drain parties” underground!

NB: Most of the projects created in the workshops were interactive. Click the green flag to start. You may then have to click on sprites or press keys to trigger the action.

Drain party

Trampoline

Well done everybody!

february 4th in barrow

February 4th saw us at St. James’ C of E Primary School. Here are some photos of the class hard at work:

Thinking hard

Working with Scratch

One of the lessons we learnt from the previous session was to encourage the pupils to draw their own characters wherever possible, rather than relying on Scratch’s “clip-art”. This produced a more personal feel.

The St. James’ group also discovered the delights of the Pen command!

Here are a couple of examples of unedited projects.

NB: Most of the projects created in the workshops were interactive. Click the green flag to start. You may then have to click on sprites or press keys to trigger the action.

Robot world

Flower walk

This project is interesting because the pupils who created it demonstrated that they were acquiring the programmer’s “what if?” mindset (“…but what if I can make it do this? And then that?”) Whilst they couldn’t handle all the scripting themselves, the ideas they asked us to help them with grew progressively more sophisticated.

Well done everybody!

february 3rd in barrow

The workshops kicked off at Barrow Island Community Primary School. Working with a small group of pupils, we were able to develop a highly creative, collaborative relationship over the course of the day (with some members of the group reluctant to leave at the end!)

Within the theme of the project, there was space for individuals to explore their own interests – whether football or fashion design.

I’ve linked to a couple of unedited projects, so you can see how far the pupils were able to progress in the space of a day.

NB: Most of the projects created in the workshops were interactive. Click the green flag to start. You may then have to click on sprites or press keys to trigger the action.

Football

Robo-teachers

Well done everybody!

Fly Art Barrow – workshops

Fly Art Barrow continued with four day-long workshops at each of the participating schools.

Each of these workshops followed the same schedule:
- introduction to Scratch (working through the “Getting Started with Scratch” document available on the Scratch website).
- project planning
- project execution
- project review and close

The theme for all the projects was “One Hundred Years from Now.” We asked the pupils to visualise how the school environment might have changed by 2109. Between the INSET day and the project sessions, the participating pupils had taken photos of areas of their respective schools which they considered to be unfit for purpose in some way – be it “unwelcoming”, “boring” or “ugly”. These were used as the basis for the various projects, some of which were undertaken individually, others of which were completed by two or more pupils working together.

We also prepared a “prompts” sheet to aid ideas generation and provoke discussion. Questions included:

What’s the world like in 2109?
Think about: climate change…technology…war…animals in danger
What’s your school like in 2109?
Think about: the buildings, the grounds, inside the classrooms, what they are made of and what they look like
What things from 2009 would you keep?
Think about: where you enjoy being now, your favourite place or your favourite things to do
What things from 2009 would you change?
Think about: what don’t you like about your school building and the school grounds? Why?
What are children doing at school now?
Think about: different subjects, teachers, computers, pens, books, sport, school uniform, school dinners

Projects were planned with pencil and paper, with an emphasis on producing annotated, working drawings rather than “pretty pictures”. Working within a short timescale, the emphasis was on creative thinking and developing a basic level of confidence and competence with using Scratch.

February 2nd in Barrow

On Monday 2nd February I visited all four of the Barrow primary schools taking part in the project, along with Project Assistant Rachel Holmes.

We spent an hour at each school, during which time I introduced both myself, by showing some examples of my work (the animation “Man-Eating Zombies…In Blackpool!” proved especially popular!), and also some of the concepts underlying Scratch.

We did this by asking the pupils to “act out” Scratch instructions, such as…

“Walk ten steps”

Then…

“Walk ten steps….forever”.

But what happens when you reach the wall?! You end up marching up and down on the spot, unless you include an additional command…

“When you reach the wall, turn around.”

We also used a tambourine to introduce some sound-related code (“Play five times!”) and elected one pupil as  ”Mouse”, who could tell other pupils to carry out their own set of instructions by touching them on the shoulder. Not forgetting of course the two pupils who were in charge of all the action – one with a green flag and the other with a red “Stop!” sign. Translating the abstract world of code into real-life events helped the pupils to begin to understand the logic of computer programming.

For inspiration, we showed a selection of  Scratch projects already online – works produced by both children and adults, including animations, games and quizzes:

Dress Up
Do You Know Europe?
Day Dream
Skeleton Poser

…and left each class fired-up and ready to go!

Fly Art Barrow!

This is something of a Fly Art Barrow retrospective…

The project kicked off with an INSET day on January 19th at Art Gene Gallery in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, presented by the Project Artist, Sally Olding (that’ll be me then).

First off, I showed the teachers some examples of animation-based works that I have created previously, utilising various techniques (Flash, stop-motion, collage, model-making, drawing, iMovie, interactives, etc) and working with a wide range of different groups (children, older people, adults with learning disabilities, service users at a drug and alcohol rehab centre).

Within the context of the classroom, animation can become a complex and unwieldy task, so I outlined a methodology for planning, delivering and evaluating animation projects effectively. This can be broken down as follows:

- research
- ideas generation
- storyboarding
- identifying tasks
- resource generation
- authoring/programming
- polishing and testing
- release
- feedback

Next, we looked at the many different types of software packages that are available for creating both animation and animation resources such as imagery and sound. I was particularly interested in flagging up some of the great free/open-source goodies that are available – ideal for use in schools, where industry-standard apps may be neither appropriate or affordable. These include:

Pencil (vector animation)
Blender (3D)
GIMP (bitmap imagery)
Audacity (sound)

I’d decided to use Scratch for the Fly Art Barrow project. Scratch is an application developed by MIT for young people aged eight years old and above. It can be used to create animations or interactives. Whilst Scratch’s programming language contains many of the elements found in “traditional” programming environments, it has a logical “click-together” structure and “plain English” syntax that makes it very easy to use. Projects can be shared on the Scratch website or embedded into other websites (much in the manner of Youtube videos). Scratch is cross-platform, free to download, accessible and offers extensive support via online resources and discussion boards. All of these reasons influenced my decision to focus on using Scratch in this project. This would be my first time using Scratch in a project, so I would be learning too!

So then it was time to get “hands-on”, with a practical introduction to Scratch! The concepts we explored were exactly those which the pupils would be getting to grips with in the coming weeks, such as event handlers, repeat loops and conditionals – with just a little “extra” in the shape of an introduction to variables (making algebra so much more exciting).  This knowledge is really all that’s required to start making Scratch animations and interactives – it’s amazingly intuitive and immense fun.

We rounded off the day by devising lesson plans that utilised Scratch. I asked the group to imagine that their pupils were already familiar with the Scratch environment, so we could concentrate on exploring how Scratch could be used across the curriculum to provide a rich and engaging learning experience.

The Audible Picture Show

The results of the Lancaster student’s hard work will be shown publicly during The Audible Picture Show on the 4th April at 1:30pm at The Dukes in Lancaster.

The Audible Picture Show is an international, touring collection of audio works created by a diverse range of people including visual artists, film makers, animators, radio makers, audio artists, sound designers, writers & musicians.

Each show is compiled from the growing archive of 100+ unique audio pieces, this one includes the new audio commission created by local students who recently took part in the ‘Fly Art Project’ with Storey Gallery.

Each student who took part will have 5 free tickets for themselves and their friends and family to attend. These will be handed out shortly. Alternatively tickets can be booked for £5 (£4 concessions) by calling The Dukes box office on 01524 598500.

This event also provides and opportunity to see the outcomes of the Manchester and Barrow Fly Art projects.

For more info visit the Storey Gallery website

Pass the pigs

Some of the students who took part in the Lancaster phase of the Fly Art project shot some footage of their progress and interviewed other students to find out what they thought of sound art.

Here is a short edit of their film.

Lancaster artists work now online for listening!

The ‘My Pet, Your Pest’ project is very nearly at an end. The sessions at school are over now and you can hear everyones sound art pieces on the next page, ” ‘My Pet, Your Pest’ listen hear!’ “. There is also a piece of audio translated from the Pig Toy data that you can see on the previous post. 

I am now going to make a final piece from parts of all the pieces, and the pig data, and it will be played at The Audible Picture Show (http://www.audiblepictureshow.org.uk/) on 4th April at The Dukes theatre in Lancaster. This is a brilliant event and a fantastic opportunity for all of us working on the project to experience our work at a renowned sound art event staged in a top quality venue! I hope you can all make it along.

Tim

‘interfacing’ with the ripley pigs!

We took our Arduino loaded pig toy ‘interface’ down to the Ripley farm and gave it to the pigs to play with. We were very succesful in generating our data (which looks like this: 494, 495, 508, 485, 496, 390, 443, 482, 500, 491, 488, 529, 490, 491, 495, 471,

or this:

489, 499, 307

491, 487, 312

488, 488, 312

490, 488, 313

488, 487, 315

494, 491, 349

494, 497, 315

490, 489, 314

depending on how many streams we want to use). Tim will go off and make some sounds with this data that will feature in the final main sound piece, and it will be available here on this site in its raw form too. When it is finished.

Here are some piggy pics of our pink friends playing with their new toy.

We packed the bottom section of the toy with piggy treats to make it alluring to the animals

Playing, programming pigs

Listening in

“Lets see if we can eat this…”

building the arduino pig toy at Ripley

Back at Ripley St Thomas again. We started today by building the toy for the pigs that we designed last week. The toy contains an Arduino board with an accelerometer attached. When the pigs move the toy around they generate data that Tim will turn into sound using a piece of software called SuperCollider (an open source programming environment for making sounds and music).

Pig Toy - hamster ball superstructure will jingle bell inserts

Photos and video were taken as we were working. Billie took most of the photos and Maddie and Beth made the video (which will be posted here when it is edited).

The Arduino card wrapped and ready for installation

Fixing the Arduino into the toy lid and connecting via USB

A look under the hood....

Pig toy complete!

Makin' movies...

We coated the USB cable with flexible cardboard and silver gaffer tape to protect it from the pigs fangs!

The whole assembly

St Annes update

The inset at Castlefield was really good on the 23rd Jan. Great lunch at the kings arms  Lots of interesting work both in the gallery and examples brought by simon.

The actual day in school on the 5th Feb went well.  Simon got the pupils doing some programming then they did some animations in pairs before taking part in a whole group activity.  Simon showed us some of the images he had taken and they look brilliant.  On the friday afternoon the pupils finished by experimenting with some different networking ideas.  The day and a half was filled and we managed to produce lots of work.  Look forward to seeing the final outcome.

Down on the farm at Ripley st thomas school

On the second day of our workshop we went down to the farm at Ripley St Thomas School to make some recordings of the animals there. They have pigs, calves, chickens, and sheep now with lambs. Everyone managed to get some really good material for our pieces. We even went down to the canal to record the ducks and swans, which weren’t impressed and swam away……

One group played with some contact microphones too to see what other kinds of sounds they could record through solid materials and on surfaces.

Feeding the sheep

Interviewing a calf!

Oink! A willing participant.

Interviewing Mr Bush

Earlier on in the day we also decided on a design for our pig ‘interface’ which we will build out of a hamster ball, some bubble wrap, a piece of hose and some jingle bells. This, we hope, will be fun for the pigs to play with. Meanwhile, our Arduino microcontroller card with its accelerometer attached (built into the hamster ball) will be zapping out some data that we can sonify using SuperCollider later on.

In the afternoon we had a go at playing with Audacity and tried editing a few sounds. We had a lot to listen too, so we spent most of the time choosing which recordings were best for our pieces.

Day 1 in Lancaster!

Our project up in Lancaster got off to a roaring start yesterday with a quick afternoon session all about listening. We listened to some examples of sound art, particularly those which include field recordings, by artists such as Tacita Dean, Douglas Quinn and Matthew Herbert. (We also listened to other stuff by Ryoji Ikeda and looked at a video of a sculpture by Jean Tinguely.) Good stuff.

Then we did a quick listening exercise which gave everyone a chance to try the sound recording equipment and open their ears. We made some sound maps of the school (Girls Grammar this time) by finding 3 locations and making sound recordings of them. You can hear an example from each group below. And then we drew a map showing each location, and added words to describe what we heard. Now we have our ears open we can start collecting sounds for our project next week.

   

Walking on gravel recorded by Group A

Down by the pond recorded by Group B

Listening in on a singing lesson recorded by Group C

In the corridor recorded by Group Z

test audio post for tim

audio

Enjoy – my first post

Hullo, this is fun – something like facebook

This is a possible tag for lancaster

Perhaps if we use ‘flyartlancs’ as a tag for each post that we make it should be easy then to find all the relevant posts for our own project. You just have to remember to add a tag each time you make a new post.

This is LGGS

Found this and quite liked it

shoe project

shoe designed by a year 8 pupil

Looking forward to seeing the results

I will be attending the last workshop. I can’t wait to see the results

Tomorrow

Top of my Christmas list

Probably a normal day