London BETT Trip

BETT 2014 was hosted in London's Excel Centre. BETT an opportunity for technologists and educationalists alike to share and exhibit their ideas of how technology can help learning in education. BETT covered learning technology for:

• Primary
• Secondary
• Higher Education
• Workplace Learning & Development.

Michael Gove opened the show and there were over 300 speakers presenting seminars and new ideas. The exhibitors that I found most relevant were ZU3D and Animate Me, both of these are programming software aimed at children. Here a just a few photo we took whilst visiting BETT and London.

 

Hopscotch

Programming using Hopscotch

Hopscotch is programming for everyone and anyone. It is available on the IPad and is very similar to Scratch. You can make games, animations, stories and other interactive programs by using the various commands on screen to drag and drop blocks of code together. Having the software on Ipad allows you to shake and tilt the ipad to control your characters in your animation. I found this easier to use than Scratch as it seem likes complicated. In this session, we made a house using the characters to draw the lines of the house.

My Scratch animation

My Scratch Animation

This animation was created using the program 'Scratch'. We started using Scratch in our sessions before Christmas. Scratch is a free programming software which allows you to create your own interactive animations. Firstly, it was confusing, as this software was completely new to me, but once I got into it, it was easy to pick up! To get to terms with our software, we had to create a maze on the screen for our 'Sprite' to move through. Then after creating our maze, we then moved on to creating our own animation. I choose the 'Africa' theme and used a Lion and Elephant. Here is a screenshot showing how I created my animation. 

In my animation, the lion is chasing the elephant. This was difficult to begin with, as trying to get all the commands in order was very time consuming but after working hard I created my animation.