Serendipity

Excellent day. Met with three teachers about various projects:

A fifth-grade class is doing a stop-motion animation (thumb cinema- Daumkino) project: which portray encounters of various creatures/monsters (drawn in primary colours) and how these encounters produce strange and wonderful consequences (drawn in secondary colours). The students have made up their creatures and written their storyboards. They start this week filming the stop-motion animations.

A grade 9 class has started the “Marketplaces of the World” sound seeing tour (podcasting) project. The students are also responsible for film and photo documentation of the project. There is an exchange group here from French speaking part of Switzerland. Hoping to lasso the teacher or students into participating in the project as well.

Another grade 9 project is titled “Who am I in 20 years” (or maybe it is called something different). It is an interactive website presentation about five students of today (2005) and then in twenty years (2025) (yes, I still can add). The students have “created” five representative persons with biographies, likes and dislikes, etc., which they are going to present in English on a website.

The grade 13 class is also doing an interactive website presentation, which is part of an extensive project concerning career orientation.

My flavour-of-the-month project is a pervasive game project in the form of a mobile (in the real world) advent calendar project. The grade five (the first grade in high school) classes each have two student mentors. These mentors are going to program an interactive multimedia questionnaire (with software one of our university students has developed called Moles) for PDAs.

In December, the children will go on a treasure hunt each day to discover a “door” in or around the school and face a challenge. If they accomplish the challenge, they will get a piece of marzipan and part of a puzzle for their Advent calendar.

The best news though, was the “unofficial”, but ever so longed-for information that one of “my” master students, whose thesis I have been supervising, will be receiving an A on his thesis. This is the best mark given. Something he very much deserves, but nevertheless, we are both in a state of ecstatic shock.