Here are the first two videos of our Bridge Testing. The bridge was entirely constructed from newspaper and a minimal amount of scellotape and was required to hold at least 1lb in weight.

There was a healthy amount of competition between the pupils as you can see from the joking that goes on. (The reference to “Quasimodo” is the nickname for Ewans teams bridge. It was somewhat lopsided).

Our second year class have completed their bridge building project with some excellent results. Mr Cockburn our student teacher had the class for the first four lessons where they investigated lots of different bridge types, built some arch bridges and learnt about triangulation.

Mrs Smyth then took the class forward to designing and building their own bridges. The class were set tight parameters about what the bridge had to be:

• constructed from newspaper and scellotape,
• suspend a minium of 500g for 20 seconds
• be free standing (can’t stick bridge to desk)
• span a gap of 500mm
• be a maximum of 250mm height, 100mm width

Each team was scored in various area:

• Weight held
• Weight of bridge (the lighter the better)
• Construction of joints/bridge
• Teamwork
• Cost (1 broadsheet of newspaper cost £1000, 500mm of scellotape cost £500)

Second year, I would like you to evaluate the success of this project and provide me with some good honest feedback about how well (or bad) you thought the whole project went.

1. Describe 2 new things that you learned during the project.

2. Describe 1 thing that you thought was particularly tricky.

3. What was your favourite part of the project and why?

4. What could you have done better during the project? You can talk about the group work or when you were working on your own

5. And lastly what could your teacher have done better (e.g. what could be done better for next year)?

Since I started working at the Royal High in August we have had 4 or 5 visitors to the school mostly ex pupils who are now studying or working in the Design Industry. As a new teacher here I have been really impressed by the links that have been maintained between these people and the teachers and also the insightful and creative presentations that these former pupils have given.

On Thursday,  Scott Salter – who was in the first ever Advanced Higher Graphics class (a claim to fame indeed) – visited to talk to our fifth and sixth years about his journey from making his choices at school to where he is now working as an Industrial Designer.

Scott’s presentation was a frank, thoughtful and insightful description of his life from sixth year to the present date. He made some challenging points and had a clear message – choose your path for the right reasons.

He questioned the sixth years as to how they are getting on with their UCAS forms and recalled his experience about the huge emphasis placed on filling in the form correctly and making the ‘perfect’ personal statement. He then challenged this, saying that it’s not the codes and words that are important, it is about the student knowing what they want to do. He encouraged our students to reflect about this, to make sure that they are taking the right steps in their future education. He encouraged them to take a gap year, a valuable time in his own life where he was able to reflect and change his mind from studying architecture to Product Design Engineering at Glasgow University. He took a year out working at Benmore Outdoor Centre and felt that it helped him prepare for the reality of university which needs a lot of maturity and independence to be successful in. He also emphasised the importance of vocational courses, particularly in terms of getting a job after qualifying.

From my perspective as a teacher, I learned a lot about Scott’s frank recollections of university – in particular the ability to be able to stand up and present your ideas to your tutors and peers and importantly be able to take criticism about your work and build from it. In my opinion the school environment makes it too easy for pupils to be spoon fed or always praised about their work especially in the Design environment where there are not black and white solutions to a problem. Nick Hood, a teacher from Fife  blogged about this a few months ago, using praise effectively for students to develop. I hope to incorporate more opportunities for pupils to stand up and present their ideas to their classmates and also to be able to offer constructive critisism.

Scott recommended for prospective university students to challenge university tutors at the interview stage, particularly asking about the details of first year coursework and not to be seduced by glitzy final year projects. He explained that the first three years of his design course were years of solid groundwork where he studied maths and physics in detail giving him the skills and knowledge needed, for example to be able to conduct stress analysis on materials. It was only in his fourth year that he was really given the creative freedom to design a solution to a problem, spending four out of five days at the Glasgow School of Art.

Scott’s experiences of working as a Product Designer first at Benedetti’s and now at Bell Isolation Systems, a small company which designs and manufactures its products on the same site. Scott has had a wide range of experience and talked to our students about the good, the bad, and the ugly points of being a designer. He emphasised the importance of being able to decide ‘when good enough is good enough’ explaining that for companies to be productive they need to put products on the market to be sold. It isn’t effective for a company to be developing a product, for example, the i-phone for seven years, instead they products need to always be developed and released to the market at appropriate stages of their development. He also talked about the importance of the design cycle and good management of a design team.

We would like to thank Scott both from the pupils and staff for coming up to spend some time with us and hope to be working with him in the near future with our Higher Product Design classes. Having someone external to education who is knowledgable and relevant in their field is of huge benefit to our pupils and our own development – so thankyou!

On Tuesday 27th October I had the pleasure of coming into Royal High and doing some observations and getting involved with the teaching. I’m considering becoming a teacher after i finish my masters so this was really good experience for me. The first lesson I got involved with was the advanced higher graphics course, which were analyzing magazine articles and finishing of 3d models in blender. The second class i sat in was 4th year craft & design. They were starting to design their 4th year projects. For third block i sat in Mrs Smyth’s 3rd year craft & design class. Lastly (due to my own deadline’s) Mrs Smyth and myself ran a quick design exercise with a focus on interaction design.

What i took from this experience was that teaching design in schools is incredibly rewarding and fun. What i enjoyed most about it was getting involved with pupils creativity and helping them to devlop idea’s. Especially in the design exercise Mrs Smyth. There was a large amount of creativity in this quick 30-minute task. (The task was to design an alarm clock with a focus on how the user interacts with the clock itself). I was very impressed with e-scape project and how interacting with laptops helps the pupils to organize a portfolio. What i interpreted from this was that the more interactive learning becomes the more fun it is for the pupil.

There was a big emphasis on creativity in Mr Stevenson’s 4th year craft & design class in which the pupils were starting to design their projects. I was impressed with the work they were preparing to undertake. There was a lot of good projects going about and the pupils had a really good idea of what it was they were wanting to design and make.

Mr Black’s advanced higher graphics class were also undertaking ambitious projects with regard to the blender assignments. A lot of the pupils were modelling human characters (a big step up from when i did the course and was making kangaroo’s). The pupils also seemed to have a good idea of what was good or bad about the magazine article’s they brought in. I enjoyed talking to them about what i thought was good about the layout and other interesting points about each article.

The whole experience for me was thoroughly enjoyable and teaching is a career i’m definitely considering. I managed to take some pictures during the time i was there. Some of the advanced graphics class and some of the e-scape project.

Thank you to CDT department for having me in that day.

Several teams have now completed the construction, programming and testing of their robots.  Working in teams of three, the process is going to take around five hours for all teams to complete the assignment, and it has been very successful.  For example, the ’scorpion’ robot featured in one of the video recordings below is the best built example of its type we’ve seen so far.

We’d like to now roll the project out to all S2 classes, but this is unrealistic because each kit may only be used by one team at a time.  As we only have enough kits to run one class at a time, and as we only see S2 classes for around thirty three hours during a session, we could only realistically run the project with around half the cohort: we have eleven classes in S2.  A further investment in an additional six kits, minimum, at around £180 each is therefore required.  Even then, it’d be tight to do it.

Yet another consideration is access to computers, to consult the build instructions and do the programming.  Each team requires a computer.  We don’t currently have enough laptop computers to be able to do the project out with our computer suite.  We only have one computer suite, and it is often difficult to timetable access.  For instance, our Advanced Higher Graphics class is being run in the Computing department this session, as we can’t timetable access to our own facilities: it’s a good job we run the course using free software, because we couldn’t afford licences for another suite of computers.

Also, we’d like to continue to run our informal robots club at lunch times, but this will require more dedicated kits.  On top of that, pupils in S1 classes have expressed an interest in doing this project, and Mr Stevenson has agreed to give class 1j the next available slot when the kits aren’t in use by an S2 class.  This does, however, depend on their teacher learning how to use Lego Mindstorms – I haven’t yet.  Yet another CPD opportunity.

Jim