foolfillment: the blog

It’s hard to believe that my time at Ross High is almost over, just a day and a half left before the end of the Summer Term and the end of my probation year. There’s lots of things running through my head about the year and it’s difficult to keep in mind that I won’t be walking the corridors there for much longer.

It has been a really good year and I’ve gained a huge amount of experience and (I think) become a lot better at this whole teaching thing. I’ll be sad to leave on Friday lunchtime but I’m sure I’ll still be in touch regularly and I hope that my classes will keep adding material to the department’s flickr account.

I just want to finish off by saying a huge thanks to all the staff at the school, in particular the all the boys in CDT. The biggest thank you has to go to all of the pupils of course, they are the ones who’ve made all the hard work, late nights, and early starts worthwhile.

Having posted a week or so ago about trying to get my 4th years to be a bit more creative, my efforts have come around to bite me.

With Standard Grades being sat at the end of 3rd year at Ross High it gives us a whole 2 years to cover the higher courses. So far this is showing some good and some bad points. One of the good things to come out of it in the CDT department is the chance to overhaul the structure of some courses. In Product Design for instance we are giving the pupils the chance to be a lot more hands on and to actually make some of the things they design. This is great because the pupils get to see their designs right through from brief to manufacture and evaluation, it also makes sure they have to take the development of ideas through its full cycle and leave no details uncertain.

However that is causing some small headaches. The project they are currently working on is to design a promotional radio. The pupils are to design the radio and then create a pattern around which plastic will be vacuum formed, then they wire up a radio kit and mount it inside their plastic shell.

The class have come up with some really creative forms, the trouble is finding a way to create the pattern that the plastic will be formed around. The original idea had been that the form of the radios would be simple extruded shapes, and we’d be able to make the pattern from some timber or MDF - no such luck, I’ve tried to put together a rough model of one idea, I’ve probably simplified it:

This afternoon I posted this image on pownce asking for any advice on how to make it and Ian quickly came up with some good ideas. Of course that is exactly the sort of conversation that the pupils could have benefited from being involved in or even better, leading - my task is to get them set up on pownce sometime in the next fortnight or so.

The link above to my pownce post won’t work unless you have an account and are marked as my friend, but I have invites left if you want one.

I don’t want to make a habit of these short posts so I’ll try to make this the last.
I found out my school today - Ross High in Tranent. I’ll not say any more than that for now, I’m hoping to manage a visit on Monday and after that I’ll maybe have a firmer idea of what I’ll be teaching next year and how much blogging I’ll be able to get in. Afterwards I’m planning to make it along to the next edubuzz open meeting.

On an unrelated note I was at uni today for a session on Inspiring Creativity and Design with 3D Modelling, I’m going to try to write up some of the presentations here soon but it’s looking like I’ll be bust for the next wee while. I will really have to nag Eddie Mack (one of my lecturers and the organiser of today’s event) to get around to putting his presentation online using youTube and technobuzz.