These photos were taken by Dom Okigbo and James Lowe during a Friday double block.  Daniel and Darren were absent from class.

This session, for the first time, we have two senior Practical Craft Skills classes, being taken by Mr Allan and myself.  Currently, there are twenty-eight pupils on the course, down from a starting figure of thirty-four, as pupils have left school or re-coursed.

This session, I hope to make time to submit bowl and cook book stand projects to SQA for pre-verification.  Together, they will replace the standard course project covering machining.  I also hope to submit an Intermediate 1 level wind chime, as a final project.  I’ll post examples here in due course.

You’ll see examples of Practical Craft Skills work from previous years over at our main departmental web site.

This year, I’ll be encouraging pupils to use http://dropbox.com.  Dropbox provides 2 GB of free storage on its servers (and up to 100 GB, for a fee).  The smart thing though, is that the service enables a user to synchronise the content of his drop box with identical folders located on his desktop P.C., laptop, and smart phone.  A user may have this folder duplicated on as many computers as desired.  Dropbox runs in the background on your computer, ensuring that files are kept up to date.

It’s also possible to synchronise a folder on a ‘U3 enabled’ USB stick.  U3 enabled USB sticks aren’t always recognised by computers, and this is the case at The Royal High School.  In any case, Dropbox’s site is blocked within school.

I expect teachers in other schools are encouraging their pupils to use services that are similar to Dropbox.  In the past, pupils here have used Sky Drive,  which allows on-line storage.  They’ve also used Diino, before its free service was discontinued.  Neither of these offered the automatic synchronising of data over several computers / devices, however.

If you’re using an on-line storage / synchronising service, which is free for pupils to use, then let us know about it.  Also, if you’ve been able to / allowed to get it running in your school, please get in touch.

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).

I produced these drawings while preparing for the new session, when pupils in the Advanced Higher Graphics class will be using pastels to produce the ‘visuals’ for their desktop publishing assignments.  They’ll also use their pastel drawings to illustrate their final pieces.

Each of the drawings is an exercise from the Pastel Workbook by Jackie Simmonds.

Our Advanced Higher Graphics pupils will be illustrating their main desktop publishing (DTP) piece using pastels this session.  As I’m a beginner myself with the medium, I’ve been practicing (see earlier post) and reading instruction books.

A few days ago I purchased:

Painting Beautiful Skin Tones with Color & Light, by Chris Saper.

In the introduction of her book, Ms Saper states:

‘Intuitive instruction – “just pick out some color,” “use color that expresses the way you feel” – has never helped me.  But instructors who have taught me how to see – what to look for and why – have given me tools I can use for a lifetime.  This book is designed to give you tools you can use, too.

The book is superb, and covers portrait painting with oils, watercolour and especially pastels, really well.  It’s particularly strong on colour theory and colour use, and breaks it down in to clear do and don’t guidelines.  These guidelines are relevant to any branch of painting, not just portraiture.  The book is beautifully illustrated by Ms Saper, using step by step views of her own paintings, which are stunning.

Ms Saper’s web site is at:

http://www.chrissaper.com

As well as displaying examples of her work, she lists her fees for undertaking portraits.  I expect she’s one of the few artists around who earns a living from traditional portraiture.

Ms Saper has written a second book and, interestingly, has chosen to publish it via Blurb.com, the same ‘on-demand’ printer we’ve used for our pupils’ children’s story books.  It’s at:

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/152139

Jim

At a recent parents’ night, James Gentles offered to visit us to take some aerial photos of the school.  Mr Gentles is the designer of a gadget which enables a camera to be controlled remotely, and he mounts his camera on a kite line.

On his web site, Mr Gentles has lots of stunning aerial photos.  Take a look.

Monday 31st May brought a day with enough wind to fly a kite and camera rig safely, and Mr Gentles was able to visit during school hours.  This allowed us the chance to deploy a couple of classes of S1 pupils to pose for the camera; standing on the tarmac to spell out ‘RHS’.

You’ll see from the photos that Mr Gentles tethers himself to his kite and dons a belt with lots of radio control gear around his waist.  He also uses a viewing device to see what his camera sees.  The system is ingenious.

On the day, Mr Gentles used a ‘delta’ style kite which measured two metres across.  If there’d been less wind he’d have flown one with a three metre wing span, to achieve the required lift.

We’d like to thank Mr Gentles for taking the time to visit and provide these photos.

On Wednesday 12th May, Mr Stevenson, Mrs Hislop, Mr Myles and I attended the opening night at Napier’s show.  On display was the work of Product Design graduates Anne-Lise MacKenzie, Pamela Davidson, Kirsty Dick and Andrew Buchan.

Anne-Lise is now considering enrolling in a Masters course in Glasgow, Pamela is about to embark on another degree, in Psychology, and Andrew and Kirsty hope to go in to industry.

Also on display, was work by former pupil Scott Tweeddale, who is near to completing a Masters in Interaction Design.  Scott is off to Cambridge University in the autumn to do a post graduate course in teaching.

We took a look around the Graphic Design course work too.  This course is only three years old, so its first degree show will be next year.  Work on display by former pupils included Adam Robertson, Naomi Gibson, David King and Kenny Milne.

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)?

A few months ago we bid for ‘Determined to Succeed’ funding to purchase twenty graphic tablets.  We were granted funds to purchase ten, and advised to apply next time around for funding for another ten.

Our funding bid specified that the tablets would be a ‘whole school’ resource.  This post is a review, with accompanying pupil work, for the benefit of other teachers here at school who may be interested in using them.

1.  Make and model.

The tablets are the ‘Bamboo Pen and Touch’ model by Wacom.  They cost around seventy pounds each.

2.  Software installation.

Provided you have ‘administrator access’ to the computers at school, the software installs in the usual way from the disc provided.  However, if you want to get the most up to date release of the software, visit Wacom’s site and download it, then install.

3.  Use

Pupils took to them immediately and they’ve proved especially useful for digital drawing.  They’re much easier to draw with than a mouse.  It’s easy to set the two buttons on the pen of the mouse to left click, right click or double click; whatever you find useful.  Pupils are very comfortable accessing the control options and doing this.  Although the active (sensitive) drawing surface area of the tablet is quite small at around 160×110 mm, it is easy to achieve controlled pen strokes.

4.  ’Pen and Touch’

Pupils didn’t find the ‘touch’ controls – similar to those on an i-Phone – of much use.  I suspect that if our computers were a bit more powerful, and had graphic cards, there’d be less of a time lag evident when using the touch controls.  Conversely, the pressure sensitivity feature of the pen works really well.  Provided you’re using the tablet with a programme that recognises pen pressure sensitivity, pressing harder with the pen can be set to increase line width, or opacity, or rate of ink flow etc.  Our pupils have been using the tablets with ‘Gimp’ primarily.  Gimp is an open source (free to download and use) alternative to Photoshop.  It’s good for digital painting and photo manipulation.  The tablets have also been used with ‘Inkscape’, another free drawing programme, and with Serif PagePlus and Scribus – both DTP programmes.  PagePlus is a commercial programme, but Scribus is free to download and use, and is our preferred option for Advanced Higher Graphics pupils laying out magazine articles etc.

5.  Setting up and storage

The tablets plug in to any USB socket.  When using with particular drawing programmes, experiment to find out if you need to plug the tablet in before launching the programme, or visa versa.  The tablets appear to be reasonably robust, though the nibs of the pens may be liable to damage.  This may be because of the pressure sensitivity feature of the pen.  However, each pen comes with several replacement nibs.  Our funding allowed us to purchase a few extra pens, in case of future damage.  Each tablet has a small fabric loop that the pens slide in to, for storage.  This is a very useful feature.  Our box of ten tablets is small and light enough to transport around school.  One pupil can easily carry it.

6.  Summary

We’re happy with our purchase.  The tablets have proved useful and popular and we’ll be bidding for another ten in future.

7.  Borrowing the tablets

Check with us beforehand to confirm availability, then nominate one of your more responsible pupils to collect and return them.  A second pupil should also be sent, to open doors.  If you’d like a bit of initial instruction in using them, contact me.  I’ll be happy to get you started.

8.  Examples of pupil work.

In addition to the slide show included with this post, examples of pupil work created with the aid of a graphic tablet are available to view as follows:

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1261007 – Robert Hackett

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1317051 – Rachel O’Donnell

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1259063 – Elliot Sutherland

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1277908 – Rebecca French

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1259414 – Kaitlin Pietersen

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1320058 – Ben Muir

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1267778 – Hamish Gentles

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1261506 – Jordan Dear

On Tuesday 04 May most of the class went bowling, then on for a meal, to mark the end of the course.  A huge number of photos were taken, as the camera was passed from person to person.

In past years, we’ve invited along former pupils who’ve studied Advanced Higher Graphics, but we didn’t get organised early enough to be in shape to do so this time.

At Fountain Park, we had two sessions of bowling, with Michael winning both games.  Around 9 pm we went next door to Nando’s restaurant.

At Nando’s our waiter was former Royal High pupil Chris Riva.  Late in the evening we were joined by Graham Carolan, another former Royal High pupil.  Graham expects to be posted to Afghanistan with the army, later in the year.