This is the transcript of the 'Accessibility Tools in STEM' webinar recording.
Megan:
Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Accessibility Tools in STEM webinar. Today we have Dale over in our office. And I'm joining you from my home office today as well. We've also got Tim and Anh in the background doing all of the mechanical things as well. Before we get started, I'll officially acknowledge Country. Now I am on what we call Wonnarua and Darkinjung Land at the moment here in Cessnock. Where are you, Dale?
Dale:
I'm coming to you today from the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.
Megan:
Excellent. And we want to acknowledge all of the lands that you are on as well as traditional Aboriginal lands here across Australia. We want to acknowledge all Aboriginal people as well, past, present, and emerging, and of course those in the classroom that we're supporting every day as well. I've included an image here of some kangaroo prints that I found on my property, and I've recently done a little research on how my local Aboriginal people used the land that I'm on in a techie way. And I want to acknowledge firstly, our first innovators and our first technology and our first STEM people.
And I specifically want to talk about a special resin that has been made in my area. The Awabakal, Wonnarua and Darkinjung people were spear-throwers and they would often use a very special resin made out of charcoal and grass parts, and also some kangaroo faeces and would boil that up and it would make a dough that could be moulded to hold weapons together, and was actually really, really strong. That was just a really cool little STEM story I thought from my local area, and I want to acknowledge all of the first innovators. And am always fascinated by things like boomerangs and fish traps and woomeras and things that have turned into other inventions since then as well.
Dale, would you like to introduce our team?
Dale:
I would certainly love to. I guess our team, you might recognise some of our faces from the work that we have been doing right across the state as part of the Rural Access Gap. However, now we are focusing on everyone within the state. That includes our metro areas as well. We have six of our colleagues, so six of us that are focused, I guess in live and reside in the metro areas, and we have four of our colleagues, Adam, Tim, Megan and Kate who are situated around the state. Our role is to get out to schools and support teachers as best they can in the classroom to using the digital technology that you have at your disposal.
So at the end of the session today, we have lots of forms if you want to reach out and be able to connect with us even more and get us maybe out to your school or seek some support in any way. There is a couple of forms for that at the end that we are always willing to come out and support with all the digital tools that you do have at your school, be it Apple, Microsoft, Adobe or Google, or anything else, Canva or anything you have. We're happy to come a support in all those areas. Lots of things happening in this session today. What we have here I guess is a bit of an agenda. Now, I guess Megan and I, when we're putting this session together, we're like, wow, there's so much stuff in here. How are we going to get across all this?
Now, very simply, what we're going to be able to show you today is I guess a selection of all the things that we have available to us through our stem.T4L programme. And what that's going to mean is that you'll have a little bit of a taster of how we can make that available to you and how you can use that in an accessible nature for all of your students in the classroom. So there's lots of inclusive tools that you have built into many of the aspects of what we deliver, and I hope today that you're able to take some of those things away. So we're going to explore the Code Jumper. We're going to explore what podcasting, how that could support all of the students in your classrooms, the Telepresence Robot.
We're going to look at the Makey Makey, set up a coding kit that we have as well. So our 3D printing kit and what's available there and the Sphero indi, that's our junior explorer kit, and then finish off with I guess our device experience kits and have that links through our T4L website. So it's going to be an action-packed hour. Megan and I will make sure we're on the gun and we keep moving through, but there'll be plenty of, I hope today a little wet the whistle a little bit, a little bit of an idea of what's available to you out there through our stem.T4L programme.
Megan:
Yeah, it is definitely not a how-to session. It's more a broad, this is what's available and this is how you could use it. Have you thought about using it in this way to support students, but also staff if necessary as well, but also the design thinking for other students to support people with additional needs as well. So hopefully there's something usable in our kits here. So if you haven't seen it before, these are our stem.T4L kits that are free to borrow. And there are links all the way through our slideshow, which you'll get sent along with this recording after the webinar. And you can access this yourself and just have a look what's available there to borrow. If you haven't seen them before, they may have been at your school in the big black Pelican cases, and you get them for depending on the kit, a one term or two term booking and then they get moved on to another school.
Absolutely free, and I think a lot of people don't even realise that this wonderful resources out there. And it will support everybody across entire schools, but today we are going to focus in on just a few of the devices in these kits that can support with accessibility needs. Now the main place where our resources have come from is this stem.T4L learning library. Now you can add it as a tile in your essentials. You can go to that short link t4l.link/stem, or you can follow that link as well. It will need to log in with your department credentials to get in there. And when you get in, you will find a list all down the left of all of our kits and that will take you to everything that we think you need to know, including all the how-to videos.
So as I said, today is not a how to do things, but all of those video resources are there and that would always when you get a kit, be the first place that we send you to that Learning Library page where you will find those how-to videos and anything you need to get your kit up and running. I'm going to hand it over to Dale first. Dale's going to talk about this very cool little tool, the Code Jumper.
Dale:
Yes, thanks, Megan. I guess what we will make available to everyone today is our slide deck at the end of the session today. And what you'll find on each of our particular slides, because we won't necessarily be death by PowerPoint here in a moment. We'll slide away and we'll have a lot of stuff happening on the desk in front of us, either myself or Megan. So at the end of it you'll find on each of our particular slides that we've set up here, as you can see from this example, there is some links in those blue spaces on the right. So feel free, when you get the deck to jump in and have a little bit more of a closer exploration of all the different tools that we're going to play around with today.
So the first thing we're going to dive into today is a little, I guess the kit that we have called the Code Jumper. So our Code Jumper starts with a bunch of different apparatus and little toys that come together and it's great for our students who have some visual, I guess, concerns in our classrooms. Now it's made up of a bunch of different tools to it. It connects to our devices by Bluetooth and we'll be setting that up in a moment. This one here is the hub. It actually also comes with a couple little play pods. And on our play pods, it has two little dials on here, and when you jiggle these dials and you manoeuvre them in different ways, they do different things in our coding setup. So this can help our students who are visually impaired to still get that same experience for coding in the classroom. They can still have that problem solving aspect, that computational thinking and really challenge themselves to be able to do different things in a different way, I guess.
And what we have found with students who want to jump on and do some of this work with the Code Jumper kit is that all students really get excited and like to be able to explore in this particular space. So it's really a great way to be very inclusive in the classroom. So the kit itself comes with a whole bunch of play pods, eight play pods in it. It also comes with some other sections, another one called a loop, a looping tool, looping pod as well. So you can play around with that one and another one called a pause. So there's lots of little things we can do with this particular space. And what I'm going to... Basically how it sort of works is it's got... And you'll notice around the side here, it's got some little connections on the side and each of these connections refer to a different number on the screen and I'll show you that in a moment. Has a play button on the top and a stop as well.
So when you push the play button, it'll read out I guess what you've asked it to do. If you push both the play and the stop at the same time, what that will do is it'll read all the code that you have written back to the user. So that'll help everyone understand what is being sort of set up as you go. But it does talk to you as you do it, which is really, really handy as well. As I said around the side here, it represents different things. And you'll see on the coding in a moment that when I'm playing, when I plug into number one over here on the side, it'll only recognise and set up with the coding strips that I've set up on this side over here. So I will just share my screen and I'll give you a quick little live demonstration of how some of these things will work.
Megan:
I just love how easy this was to pick up and go. I know the first time we did a demo with this, Dale, we were really a little bit worried about not knowing how to do it, because we didn't have our own kit to test with. And it was so easy. So the first step is to get this software on your computer. I think that was the hardest part for me, because I didn't have admin rights.
Dale:
No, no, very, very true, very true. So it connects to your device via Bluetooth. You've got the programme running at the moment, which you can see on my screen. As I said before, I've got thread 1, 2, 3, and 4. They connect to those four connections that I talked about a little bit earlier on. So all I'm simply going to do is I'm going to plug into the thread number 1. Oh, actually, sorry, I'll plug into thread number 2 just for this quick little activity. Now when I plug in you should hear a little bit of a click. And I didn't quite hear that click that time, but it should hear a little bit of a click. So hopefully this starts to work and I can just test it. It's not seem to be working. I'll try that again. Obviously the wonders of modern technology here. I will just... Give me one second. Share that sound. There we go. You've got me now so you can hear a bit of a boom.
Megan:
Yep, I can hear that loud and clear.
Dale:
The important thing. You want to make sure you hear the click. That's the click. A little bit slow on the uptake here on the meeting today. But you can start to adjust each part of, I guess you've got a sound and a speed aspect here on the screen. So if I switch this around, you're going to start to hear a different instrument played.
Now I can quite simply set that up nice and easy. I can also adjust the speed that plays with that instrument by turning the other knob very, very simply there. So if I wanted to set up a quick little musical song, I could plug in a couple of these pods as we go. I want a bass drum there. I want to set up another bass drum. That one's click straight in. That's nice. Speed is 1.5. Yep, I like that. Excellent. So far I can test it by pushing the play button. Very good. I can start making a little bit of a sound. I plug in the last one. What have I got here? Click in. The third time. There we go. Clicked in. I heard the clicking noise. I want to change that to a little bit of a hi-hat.
Change the speed. Very good. Okay, I think I'm okay with that. Just might get a bit of a gist of a song I can put together here. Now the really cool thing about this is that it has the ability to, I guess have a little bit of a loop function too. So as I talked about before, the yellow one, which was a loop setup, I can plug that into my hub and I can plug the long end of the loop into the back end of this. It'll sequence that I've set up here at the moment, and I can have that running for a certain number of times. Now I've got it at the moment set on the dial here to three times.
Speaker 3:
Four. Three.
Dale:
Three times. You can...
Speaker 3:
Four.
Dale:
No, I want three.
Speaker 3:
Three.
Dale:
Three. Thank you very much.
Okay, so I'm starting to get a little bit more of the beat that I'm looking for on this particular Code Jumper experience. If I want to add a little bit of a pause into what I might do with my little pause set up here, I might just drop that in the end. It might just sound a little bit better if I have a little bit of a click in. Thank you there. Let's have a little bit of a look here though. Pause. My pause it didn't... Set my pause up on the wrong side here. Silly me.
Megan:
And you probably can't see from this video, but each of the different pods that we can see are different colours have got completely different fields and the knobs are in different places. So anyone who's visually impaired would be able to feel which one is the pause button and which one is the loop.
Dale:
100%. And I can just make that adjustment now. And you'll see the pause one is in the orange on the screen, so it's got a dent. I've set it now to a quarter of a beat, of a little bit of a pause. So let's see if this sounds a little bit better with the old "We will rock you" at the moment. Very good. So slide a little bit better. You can guess that you can have a lot of exploration with this by setting it up into the other particular sections.
You can start playing some poetry, you can do some nursery rhymes, and just I guess it's a great little tool to help the students start their journey with coding. So they still feel like they're included like everyone else, regardless, they can't necessarily see the screen. That's totally okay, but they can get that sense and feeling for it through the sounds that are being played. So we know we have a lot of students out there who are loving the Code Jumper. We think that's a great opportunity for you to be able to explore that in your classrooms.
Megan:
Absolutely. And block-based coding like this is actually part of the stage two and three syllabus and from there up. So it is just like Dale said, a really wonderful way of getting everyone involved. Excellent. Thanks, Dale. I'm going to move on to podcasting now. And you will see that I'm in my own podcast studio at the moment. I actually have a spare bedding on the side walls there to have some really nice acoustics as well.
And this is actually the RØDECaster™ Pro that comes with the podcasting kit. The podcasting kit, as we borrow it, we borrow it in... You get three boxes. And in those three boxes we're sort of selling it as two different podcasting activities. One is the studio podcaster where you get the RØDECaster™ as you can see here, and you get four of these microphones and it's designed for people to have a conversation around a table. You also get 12 other microphones and Chromebooks that you can use as a classroom setup. So as I think about this, I've always been able to... This is just a game changer for any sort of multimedia or presenting any kind of work in a way other than writing it on paper.
But you can imagine how it would really give an environment for some kids who don't particularly like reading and writing or cannot do that, how wonderful a platform this is for them to get their ideas across, or perhaps even hear their ideas because we've got the individual headphone settings here as well. So it would be completely up to your imaginations about how you could use this to support individuals in your classroom.
And again, all of the how-to guides are on the stem.T4L Learning Library, but we also have these really great magazines out there. There's a teacher one and a student one and they give you more information on how to operate it and advice on how to set your studio up so you've got the best audio quality. And that can be really helpful for anyone with hearing impairments as well. Anything to add to that, Dale?
Dale:
No. Look, the practical application of this one, the inclusive nature of it all, it's fantastic for our classrooms. The schools that we have been to see this in action, you just see learning humming right across for everybody. And I guess that's what we love to have in our classrooms. That personalised approach in the complex nature that we have in our classrooms now and the ability for everyone to be included? Jackpot.
Megan:
Absolutely. And when I'm thinking for things like anxiety as well, people who perhaps don't want to speak in front of a big audience and they could just do something privately, it is just endless what you can do context-wise as well. So you'll see on the stem.T4L learning library page, a heap of examples from schools. And some are looking at the history of their schools. Some are telling their own narratives. We even had Gunnedah Public School on the news in Tamworth the other night, which was very cool. They've got their own community podcast out at the moment as well. So a really, really exciting tool. What's next, Dale?
Dale:
We're going to have a little bit of an exploration of my little best friend over here, the Telepresence Robot. Again, another great little tool that we have available to schools through the stem.T4L programme. Bringing our students back into our classroom as quickly as possible. Like this little friend over here on the side? Fantastic. He allows anyone to be able to join us remotely from afar. To give the students that autonomy back into the classroom that they need. They might be sick, injured, unable to come to school for any variety of reasons, but just losing that connection with school is very, very easy for a lot of our students.
So getting them to be confident and comfortable to come back into the classroom can be aided with our little friend here, the Telepresence Robot. Connecting up with our friends, we know how important that is for our young people to make sure they, I guess stay connected with their friends socially. This guy allows that to happen, which is really, really cool. How it sort of works all together, it's very simple. When you get it out to your school, you just turn it on the side, there's a little button on the side, you're going to switch it on. It pops up to this screen as you can see at the moment. It says, "I'm ready for a visitor." And when it says this, it's a strong and steady robot. So while we would always advise that someone, obviously that stays inside, someone travels around with it like a buddy to make sure it stays protected, so like a little handler and you want to make sure you keep it nice and safe as you go in your classrooms.
Now the other great thing about it is it does move. Now we won't be able to I guess move it around today, but it is possible for that student to have some remote control over it to get closer to the board, join a different group, or just connect with other students in the classroom quite easily. So it's really, really simple to use I guess in that regard. We only have a relatively small fleet of them available to you. What happens is the student receives a link, and that student then is able to dial in. We could have people dial into our meeting right now and join us for our meeting if they wanted, and they will start to pop up on our particular screen.
So it is very, very simple. If Timmy's out there and he wants to be able to dial in at the moment, he could dial in and join us for our meeting just to give us a thumbs up, just to demonstrate how simple it is once you have that particular link sent to you from our stem.T4L team. So I think it's a great opportunity for us all to be able to connect and stay connected in our classrooms right now. And there's a variety of reasons as to why you'd want to tackle telepresence set up that we have at the moment. Thanks, Megan.
Megan:
Yeah, Dale, I had one of these at my school for a sick little boy that we had at our school, and it was incredible firstly, for obviously this boy, so he could still come to school, but he didn't participate. He wasn't well and he wasn't as interested in those everyday lessons, but for him to still have the connections with the kids in that classroom. And they actually called this robot Asher. It was Asher, it wasn't a robot. And he was there some days and he wasn't other days and they hung... He was very into his cricket. So they hung an Australian cricket jersey over the handle, over the little hook there. So it actually looked like Asher going around the classroom. And to walk in and see him, I think even when he came back to school for the students to realise, okay, he doesn't have any hair anymore and how easy that transition was for everybody involved.
I can't imagine how different his life would've been if he wasn't given those connections. It was a full year, so it's a long time to not be with your friends. So really cool little tool.
Dale:
[inaudible 00:22:04].
Megan:
I'm going to talk about the Makey Makey now. So if you haven't seen it before, you might be wondering. Well, I've got a bunch of fruit here. It's the very first activity that everyone encourages you to do and you get the Makey Makey. And the Makey Makey is actually this tiny little circuit computer here, and we connect the alligator clips to it to complete circuits and it can use anything that is a conductor to complete that circuit, and we can use it to operate our computer. So what I'm going to do on this computer here is share my screen, and you can see this little Makey Makey piano that's set up there. I'm going to turn my sound on so hopefully you can hear it. Please call out, Dale, if you can't hear. I'm about to do my wonderful musical rendition of Mary Had a little Lamb on these bananas. Let me know if you can't hear it.
Dale:
Not yet.
Megan:
Yay. My dad would be so impressed with what 10 years of piano lessons has got me. So this is the Makey Makey. Now this is the very first lesson you would use this little piano if you wanted to with a whole heap. I like getting out a little STEM station of lots of different things they can work out whether it's a conductor or not. In that lesson, hopefully they discover a conductor is anything made of metal. Anything's got a bit of moisture in it. So to complete the circuit, you actually need to have the earth, which I've used the white alligator clip at the bottom, connect around to that circuit. But it was working because I am a conductor and it was going through me. So there's some really cool little lessons that you can do like getting your whole class in a circle and joining the circuit that way.
But I wanted to show how perhaps you could use this with people who might have a physical disability and might not be able to touch buttons in the way that they're designed. So I'm actually going to show you how we can code this. Now I am using Scratch for CS first, if you've used Scratch before, you will feel familiar with this. This is the safest way that we recommend you use it. You still need third party permission, but you can link it up with your Google Classroom or just sign in with your Google account, and you'll see that there's none of the regular sharing settings that are on the regular scratch page. The other option to access Scratch is to push it out through the UDM. So you've got a desktop app on your computers. But all you need to do is actually link... You might not.
I'll pull some of these out so you can see. But this is like a little game controller, and it's got the four directional arrows from the keyboard, and it's also got space and click. So let's say I use this green cord, and this green alligator clip and plug it into the left arrow. I can now code this banana to do whatever I like. So it's going to read the left arrow button on the keyboard. So if I go into events and select... I think it's this one, that's a bit... Yeah, when space keys pressed, but I'm actually going to change that to left. Now I'm looking at this upside down. I hope that's left. And then I can give it any command that I like. So if I go into sounds, perhaps, I can... this is the default, this little meow, which is fun. Let's have a go.
So I must hold my earth to complete that circuit. And now my banana is meowing. Now you could again leave this up to your imagination to code whatever you like. But I was having a little bit of a think about how we could use this. I might just move the bananas out of the way, and I've actually made some yes or no switches. Did some little time YouTubing this. There are some incredible ideas on YouTube for how to make switches and it will obviously depend on who you're making this for and what sort of needs they have. There were some very cool ones which would connect the pieces of metal by moving a handle down. Somebody had a magnet one. So you could also use your feet with these if you didn't have shoes or socks on. And I have actually created an aluminium foil bracelet so I don't have to hold onto the earth.
So all I need to do is actually plug the earth onto my bracelet and then hit these buttons. Now the code is quite simple really. I'm just going to open up. Sorry, I can't get over that. Here we go. Here is the code. So the idea of it is... It doesn't have to be this complex, but I did also add in the visual of yes and no. So it sits on orange until I make my decision. I better plug no into the right arrow. So I've got ring in the left arrow, I recorded my own voice saying yes and no. So if this works properly when I touch yes, it will say yes and the image will change on the screen as well. I'll just hit play.
Of course it doesn't work.
Dale:
Live TV.
Megan:
Beg your pardon, Dale?
Dale:
On live TV. Always love it.
Megan:
Oh yes. Yeah, yeah, it's good. Worked fine while I was practising . Oh, somebody laughed. It worked perfectly. Trust me. I'm going to go back and fix this for the recording. So problem-solving, this is another amazing skill when it comes to these STEM-related tools. Why isn't something working?
Speaker 3:
Yes.
Dale:
There it is.
Megan:
There we go. I feel like it wasn't plugged in properly. Unless it's not touching. So trying to work out where the problem is in my circuit. I haven't plugged them in. The whole audience sitting there going, "Duh." I didn't plug them into the foil. I knew it was going to be something simple, but when you're under pressure, your brain doesn't work the same. All right, let's try that. Really great planned demonstration of debugging there.
Speaker 3:
Yes.
Dale:
Yes.
Speaker 3:
No.
Megan:
There you go. So these switches could be anything. They could be attached to anything and you could make conductors out of anything. So if you're feeling inspired about the Makey Makey, I recommend you going onto YouTube and just typing in Makey Makey, perhaps switch or maybe type in the special need that you're looking for and check out other people's ideas because there's just so many incredible ideas out there. I'll stop sharing my screen, Dale, and you can introduce the next tool.
Dale:
No worries. Look, I think that's fantastic. Helping our students with some of their physical concerns they may have. Switch. Fantastic, great opportunity for us to be able to sort of help in that regard. So take a little bit of a tact this time around. We're going to explore... We've got our coding kit. And within our coding kit we have obviously a raft of different opportunities for us to do some coding. But there is one that we have up in our kit that's designed specifically for students who need a little bit of extra assistance with the visual impairments they may have to be able to once again experience what coding may be like. So we're able to use the iPad, because this is set up on an iOS download of an app called CodeQuest. It's a really great app because it links nicely with voiceover on the iPad.
So it's been designed in that way to quite be very seamless in the way it transitions on different screens and pick up obviously some of the words. Not all websites are designed that way, but this one has been designed... This app has been designed in a way to make it nice and simple. So we're going to have a bit of an explore, just to sort of show you what you can and can't do. Very entry level I guess, again with the coding. And it's something that not just our visually impaired students might want to tackle. Once again, all students in your classroom available for this one and I think it's a great way to be able to start. It's a very easy little platform. Basically the premise is you've got an astronaut, the astronaut's got to get to the rocket. It goes through some harder sections as you go.
There's six levels in it and there's five or six sections in each level. So you can have a fair bit of fun playing with different things as you go along in the app as well. It creates harder things, loops and replays of things. I'm going to introduce a bit of a blaster term, but we won't dive into that. But again, just something else you have to think about with your coding and your problem-solving as you roll. Certainly something for you to explore. So let's have a little bit of a share here. I'm going to share onto my iPad. Always the fun part. Let me know when you've got me there, Megan.
Megan:
Yep, got it.
Dale:
Beautiful. Got me. Excellent. So we're looking... At the moment, we're looking for the CodeQuest app. Very simply downloaded from the App Store. And I guess as you can see, you dive into the app. It's made up a bunch of different things. And when you dive in, this will read to you, and I'll show you how to get this started in a second. But just so we can navigate it very quickly, because once you turn VoiceOver on, things just become a little bit... I just dropped out there. Oh sorry, I'll come back in.
Megan:
We do have a lot of systems... Managing a lot of systems at once today.
Dale:
We certainly do, that's for sure. All right, now let me just get back here, turn this back on. Share my sound. All right, let's get back to where I was. So easy to use. Basically you go into play, series of planets, each planet's a level, and you'll be able to explore it. But one of the first parts you need to be able to do when you are in this iPad is you need to make sure you turn on VoiceOver. Now you'll be able to find that down in your Accessibility tools. So if you navigate in settings, you're down to Accessibility, tap on that, and you'll be able to find the top one. It's called VoiceOver. Now this change, it reads everything to you when you tap upon it on the iPad screen. So I want to be able to tap on VoiceOver. I'm going to turn it on.
Speaker 3:
Accessibility. Heading.
Dale:
So there may be a little bit of a lag in this presentation from me sharing this to my device and my device into your ears. So just sort of bear with me for that one. So what I've done now is I've turned on VoiceOver. If I tap on any word, it will read that word to me.
Speaker 3:
Zoom on button. Voiceover on button.
Dale:
So that's basically the premise for how this particular app works. So what I'm going to do at the moment is dive into CodeQuest. I tap on it once and I double-tap.
Speaker 3:
Double tap to open CodeQuest.
Dale:
Got a series of things I can be able to do. So I'm going to go and play
Speaker 3:
Tap play. Buckle up. It's time to take off. Tap here to get your assignment.
Dale:
So as you can see, there's no words for that particular part on the screen. That's why this app has been built really well around using that VoiceOver product to make it actually happen. Each of these levels is nice and simple. I'm just going to tap into a level.
Speaker 3:
Planet Kratos.
Dale:
A series of levels within it. I'm going to pick this one just for argument's sake. As I said, I guess when I enter this level in a moment, it's going to give some instructions. Now those instructions are really important for the learner because the student will have to listen to the position of the astronaut, which is usually in column one, row one. I guess a nice directional conversation needs to take place as well so they can get a bit of an understanding of what a column and a row would mean. That's really important. And it'll explain where the rocket is. So they need to be able to travel to that rocket. They'll be able to tap on the screen in a moment. Once they do tap on screen, it'll tell me what's in each of those components. Now I find this works really well if you combine it with I guess a board.
So I use the 3D printer to print myself out some wonderful figurines that have been designed already created for you through this particular app, that you can quite easily print. I've made a nice little board here on the 3D printer, so I can just sort of simulate where I would like my little astronaut to travel to. I just use nice and simple colours that come out. But this one in particular, if you can see this one, if Tim can slide over to that particular one on the screen, use the colour white to print this guy out, but he's actually in yellow. And when you're printing out, I know Megan will talk a little bit about that later on, I thought, oh, I can have a little bit of design here and a little bit of fun with this.
So I printed in white and then just use some Poscas or some Sharpies to be able to colour in the colours that I like. So that's why I've got a multitude of colours available to me in my nice little alien friend, because in one of the levels you have to drop in and pick up that alien as you travel through. So I'm going to explore this a little bit more.
Speaker 3:
Level two. Walls cannot be walked through. Move right and down to reach the ship. Remember to count your steps before moving. Start... Planet Kratos.
Speaker 4:
The level is three rows and five columns. The astronaut is located at row one and column one. The rocket ship is located at row three. Column five. There is no alien in this level.
Dale:
Now I know where you're about to say to me. How do I slow that down, Dale? But I haven't been able to figure that out. So I'm not sure if you can. But if you do tap on the-
Speaker 4:
Held button. The level is three rows and five columns. The astronaut is located at row one and column one, the rocket ship is located at row three. Column five. There is no alien in this level.
Dale:
So you can support the students by tapping on the question mark, and the question mark will be able to read that back to them again. So that's just a very, very simple way to be able to sort of navigate. And the student can navigate, find the question mark...
Speaker 3:
Read commands button. Help button.
Dale:
The help button just by tapping around the screen they start to get a feel for where things are on the screen, even though visually they will not be able to see it. So that's where the voiceover comes in nice and handy. So if I...
Speaker 3:
Astronaut row one, column one.
Dale:
Tap on my astronaut, you can just hear what happens. Then if I tap on the square just next to my astronaut...
Speaker 3:
Empty. Row one. Column two.
Dale:
It'll says it's empty. Nothing's there. I would move to there. If I tap underneath, my astronaut can't quite see my finger, so I'm going to have to try and explain that.
Speaker 3:
Unbreakable wall. Row two. Column one.
Dale:
Unbreakable wall. So the student would go around and they would start to-
Speaker 3:
Unbreakable wall. Row two. Column two.
... make a pattern of what is in this particular level or space, and then they can figure out where exactly they need to be able to travel. So once they've been able to figure out where they're going to travel, they're going to use their 3D printed board at the same time to be able to navigate those two things. And they can start developing their code. So down the bottom of the left-hand side of the screen are your directional arrows. When you tap on it...
Right button.
Dale:
... it'll tell you which obviously the button it is. Double-tap places it into the correct space. So I'm going to do that a couple of times because I've figured out here. And there's a nice little sound, there's a bit of a lag on the sound, but you can quite pick it up a little bit. One, two, three. I've got one more. And there's a different sound for each particular directional arrow. So the students will get the hang of this, obviously a little bit harder to pick it up through what we're doing in our sharing today. So I'm going to go across and I'm going to go then down two times. Oh, let's go back that one. Clear that off.
Speaker 3:
Erase all button. Erase all button.
Dale:
Do that again.
Speaker 3:
Right button.
Dale:
Double my down.
Speaker 3:
Down button.
Dale:
You can hear a slightly different sound there. Right. Then I can test it. So we'll go across the bottom. Push the play button.
Speaker 3:
Play button.
Dale:
Yep, that's the button I want. Double-tap.
Speaker 3:
You win. You took six steps. Your best performance is six steps. You got three stars. Congratulations.
Megan:
Very cool.
Speaker 3:
Back to Kratos button.
Dale:
So you get the-
Speaker 3:
Number one, your best performance is four steps. Stars received, three. Tap to go to this level.
Dale:
You get the gist of how the activity works. A series of different things as it gets a little bit harder, things get a little bit more challenging for our students, but I guess so many different ways to be able to use this in your classroom. So many different types of learners would benefit from this. And I guess it's really using that VoiceOver feature and helping our students navigate. I guess a platform like the other students will still be able to work with, but our students get to practise that skill of using a voiceover on the iPad. So really, really handy little tool for us to be able to explore. Certainly worth giving this one a go Megan, I think, in our coding kit.
Megan:
Absolutely. I know we talked about coding being in the science and tech curriculum, but I don't think teachers realise until they've taught it exactly how many skills come together in terms of numeracy and communication and collaboration and troubleshooting, problem-solving, those sorts of things that is... And so engaging as well.
Dale:
And planning, I guess planning your pathway where you're going to go that is so important in a vast array of different skills that we need in our classrooms, and as young people grow into young adults.
Megan:
Absolutely.
All right, so you can see on display in both Dale's office and my office, we've both got a 3D printer here and that's what we're going to delve in at the moment. Again, not a how-to guide all of those are on the stem.T4L Learning Library. But just an idea of how you can use this for different needs. And I'm going to firstly talk about people who might be vision-impaired and you'll see inside of the 3D printer, I've just printed a braille dice. So it will have the braille numbers for the numbers one to six. And some other features I've got here which have all come from the large 3D print page, which I'll show you in a moment. I feel like I've said that wrong, but I'll give you a demo while I'm on the big screen of what I've got. This is the surface of the moon with braille.
That's the far side of the moon and that's what the braille says down the bottom. And there is the near side of the moon. I did not realise that there were more craters on one side than the other. I guess it makes sense, but that was really educational for me. We also have the life cycle of a butterfly down the bottom there. So four different parts, a human heart and you can feel all of the different, oh gosh, aortas and things. And here is a pyramid. And this one actually comes apart and shows you what the pyramid of Giza would've looked like before when it was first built and what it looks like now. And to be able to actually have that tactile object is fascinating. I've seen some very cool things including your little code one that you had there, Dale as well.
But I will share my screen now and show you the library, the Braille and Large Print Services, 3D Print Library and where you can get this from. So again, the slides are... The button will be available on the slides so you can get all of the things that I'm about to talk about. But I did want to draw your attention to this. So this was very easy just to download that file.
You do have to quickly... If you're using our printers, it comes as an STL file, and you need to transfer the videos. We'll explain, but you put it into a programme that slices it because a 3D printer, if you haven't seen one before, does one slice at a time. I think this might be about 700 slices. This pyramid here does one slice at a time. So you do have that little step, but it's all explained in the videos. But other than that, they are all the right scale. I found I didn't have to change the size of anything. I was happy with the size that everything came out and they fit it in my printer. So you can see in here that we've got accessibility resources such as dice and mine was a six-sided dice, but there are quite a few different ones available. And it's not loading right now.
I'll jump into modern history and geography. Just taking a little while I would say because I'm screen-sharing for the images to load, but this is where I found obviously the pyramid and the moon and things like that. And I know Dale has put some other images of things in our slide deck as well if you want to duck in and have a look at those for some accessibility tools here. Some really incredible things. I've seen 3D printed maps, you can actually... And I forget what it's called. I'll just very quickly look it up for you. It is called a touch map. You can find places on the internet and put in addresses. And they can create touch maps, kind of like this moon where you would feel the map as well. And I wanted to draw your attention to... And there are a few different websites available for this. But this website here is called Thingiverse and you can get designs that are already created. So if I just type in accessible tools, for example, we'll get a wide-
Dale:
There's so many things in here, Megan, isn't there? There's so many in this place.
Megan:
So many things. And I think it's better if you're a bit more specific about what you're looking for, whether you want a gripping tool or something like that. But then if you just have a look at here... You might not even have thought of things that are available. And they've been created by other people and you can download them for free. It's a free resource library. Now as students, we actually... Well, when we give our kids out, we actually encourage people to be creating their own designs. And I've actually done this here for my cousin who has recently been put into a wheelchair and she couldn't get into her own bathroom. So it was so easy to get a ramp that was perfectly made for the size of her bathroom. I just grabbed, it's called a roof tile, but this triangular prism here and changed the size exactly. So I just asked her how tall it was. So it was this length here that I wanted to change the length of.
And you can see that you can change... it's going that side now. Very easily. You can change the width there. So it was eight centimetres into her bathroom. So then the ramp is made exactly to the right height. I did make it exactly 90 degrees as well, but it was so easy to do that. Took about six hours to print out one of these. I needed two obviously, but now she can get herself to the bathroom. So I think in terms of how this could be used to go through that design thinking process would be amazing as well. I'll give you an example of how I've done this with my class before. I took a group of girls who were interested in STEM across to our preschool across the road. And after doing a bit of a study talking about how kids really like to empathise with other people and help solve problems.
So I took the girls over to the preschool and they started watching the kids and seeing what they might've had trouble with. And then came back and followed the whole design process to think of ways to solve these problems. And they came up with so many great ideas that the preschool is still using. One of which just as an example was they noticed that these tiny little kids with tiny little faces were pushing down on the sun cream and getting a whole handful of sun cream. And they thought maybe if the lid didn't go down as far, they wouldn't get as much sun cream. So they just designed a ring that would go underneath the pump so they didn't get as much out of there.
They designed things that would stop the soap from falling on the floor and slipping on there and to stop their fingers from getting jammed in the doors. It was just the most incredible activity. So I love the prospect of perhaps going to... if you're in a space, going to somebody who has the ability to do this with a group of kids and saying, "Okay, this is such and such a problem. How can we create something that's going to make their life easier"? The whole design thinking process is another whole thing I could spend an hour talking about. But yeah, it comes in really nicely here.
Dale:
I love it, Megan. And back on that slide too, there is some great examples that other people have printed out to be able to support the students that they have, I guess in their classrooms, but also just with their lives. Just a simple thing like the top one there, like a nail cutter to be able to access that. Someone with a physical impairment there, they wouldn't be able to do that. What about just the letters on a keyboard that a little bit are larger in larger print there, so you can see them a little bit easier. If you have a look at your own keyboards right now the letters are pretty tiny. So having things like that, just small things, what about the lovely maths one there with the angles to help a student have a who has a visual impairment to be able to understand what that angle actually means so they can feel for that next time?
Great help with the writing there. The braille dice. Lots of things we could do with braille. And my favourite was probably the bottle opener. I think sometimes there is things that we all struggle to open jars and bottles, but certainly come in handy with a lot of those things that'll help our students with I guess some physical needs that they may have.
Megan:
Absolutely. I saw another great idea where a teacher was 3D printing characters from books which you could find on Thingiverse, so that they could actually feel what the character looked like, or from a movie or something like this too. So again, you're just limited to your imagination.
Dale:
You certainly are. So we want to keep on that tact limit to our imagination. One of my favourite ones, Megan, is our little friend, the Sphero indi. So I love playing around with Sphero indi. This is in our Junior Explorer kit. If you haven't come across this one before, great nice little car that comes with it. Our little Sphero indi. Very simply, you can turn him on. And what this particular I guess experience will allow our students to do is that once again, be able to get that coding aspect into their learning with their planning, the computational thinking, even some problem-solving. But instead of having to do that onto a device, quite simply this time around what you get is a whole bunch of coloured tiles. Now this is great for students who have I guess some cognitive needs, or maybe some physical needs that they may have or even visual needs as well.
The big square may be easier for some people to see. You'll put some braille on this and they can feel which particular square goes with which particular, I guess element of what one would like the Sphero indi to actually do. So the green tile in particular makes our little Sphero Indi start or go a little bit faster. The red tile, which I'm going to place down this end of the table, this will make our Sphero indi stop so all students in the classroom can have a great opportunity to be able to have a play with this. The best spot to be able to do this is obviously on the ground, where it's safer. Here, in this demonstration, unfortunately I do apologise, I don't get that same ability to be able to do that. So I've just switched him on. Plenty of videos about that. And what happens is he'll start him onto our little green square. And he should take an nice little drive and stop on our red.
He'll travel about a metre, but our coding comes in from our two different coloured squares. So that's really important to be able to, I guess start that journey. You can take that so much further. You could be able to set it up so our little friend here learns to turn left. If you wanted to do a little bit of work with some shapes, I might set this up like this, and I might just drop him in there. So I might make a little square this time, and so you can start to teach our students a bit of other thinking. I think if he should turn left. If I pop this one in at the end, nice and simple, very easy to use.
Does a little celebration when he hits the purple tile. That could be great for maths. There's other tiles that make it go on 45 degree angle, so you can set up triangles and rectangles and squares and all sorts of wonderful shapes that you can get your students to be able to design. You could even make him go on, I guess a little bit of a journey, a bit of a storytelling journey. If I get my thinking here, pink tile makes him go left, blue tile makes him go right. And I can get him to go like this and I could get him to do a bit of a story time.
So you might be able to build things around here, and then the students will be able to quite simply be able to, I guess, code this up in a way that's inclusive for all students to still have that same experience. So with a bit of luck here, you'll end up on with a little bit of a celebration, travelling around my story as I've got a lovely creative writing piece that'll be able to access in the classroom. So certainly think there is some great place for you to be able to explore the Junior Explorer Kit and how wonderful particular tools are.
Megan:
You made that look really easy, Dale. I would've spent a lot longer trying to get my lefts and rights figured out.
Dale:
Yeah, no, it is very easy to use, and that's why I think it's great. The accessibility aspects and the inclusiveness of this particular tool? Fantastic. So simple and easy to use. But as we know in all of our schools, we have a range of different devices. And I guess that's sort of the last one we want to be able to talk about today because not all devices are the same. Some have a range of different accessibility features built in within them. So I'm just going to be able to share my screen. I guess in our device experience kits, we have iPads, we have Macs, and we have a device experience kit for laptops as well. So plenty of different things for us to tap into, but we know that out there in your schools, you've got your own devices too, which is really, really fantastic for us all.
But within our particular kits, there is lots of available tools built into those devices to be able to support all of our students in our classroom with all their needs: speech needs, hearing needs, vision needs, physical needs, cognitive needs. And what we have done is developed off our T4L website here, a wonderful platform for you to be able to... I guess a bit of a one-stop shop for you to be able to explore a lot of those tools that are built into the devices to make the learning easier for all students. So if you navigate to the T4L website, you click on resources. If you go down to professional learning resources, our wonderful team here behind the scenes has developed a nice and seamless easy-to-use platform now, with wonderful tiles that you can be able to access and you want to jump into our inclusive and assistive technology page.
You'll be able to find resources for Adobe, for Apple, for Google, even your MLDs that you may have in your classroom, Microsoft, and some of our STEM tools that we are talking about today. So if you want to jump into one, let's say pick on Apple here, what we have is we've got... I guess started off with some nice and simple dictation videos to be able to jump in. And if you want your students to be able to access that particular tool, great for all of your learners. A couple of videos there on an iPad and a Mac on this particular one. But then we have lots of external links out for all of the students that you may have in your classroom. So if you jump in and have a look on some of these, you're going to see the devices that you do have, all of the wonderful things that they have already built into the devices that you have in your classroom today. So certainly worth exploring what you can do to, I guess, support all of your students. Megan?
Megan:
Yeah, and so many things I wasn't even aware of going in there and seeing what was available. So it's definitely worth having a look at what's built in there. I see also a lot people buying special programmes and then you think, oh, well that's actually built into certain devices you might not even know. So I do encourage you to go in there and have a look for how you can support kids in your class.
Before we wrap it up, we have got these forms here. If you would like our support, as Dale spoke about at the beginning, any of those areas in STEM or digital technologies at all, or if you need help with events and professional learning, please jump in and fill one of those forms out. And we also have our feedback here. If you can fill that out with the QR code or you can grab the link when you get the slides. Really, this is the first time that we have done this session and we are very, very open to feedback and how we can make it better.
We realise that we're sitting on so many incredible tools and you are the people in the classrooms every day thinking, "Oh, this is how I would use it." So we really, now more than ever, would appreciate your feedback on this. And also, include in there if you've got any things that we didn't mention that you think we should have mentioned, or any cool stories of how you've used the tools as well, because it is a growing area for us. Definitely a growing need across the world and something that we want to do well. So please give us some feedback if you can.
Dale:
And what we know, Megan, is that there are so many wonderful teachers out doing wonderful things in their own school, and sharing that with each other is amazing. So if we can come up with a platform that allows us to be able to share those things, that's fantastic. Our statewide staff rooms are a great access of that too. Another tool in our tool belt that's going to be able to support, but there's always different things if you get stuck reaching out. So important there is some wonderful people doing wonderful things out there. So thank you and keep that going for all of our students.
Megan:
Thank you for joining us, everybody. Have a lovely afternoon and get the recording... You can watch the recording when you're finished.
Dale:
Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining us.
Megan:
Bye, everyone.
[End of transcript]