Coding Club

Music Festival 2014

On Monday the 26th of May, five girls went with our music teacher, Ms Harwood Matthews, to Avonhead School Hall for an audition. These auditions were for the Special Choir in the Christchurch Schools Music Festival. The Special Choir is split into to groups, the Senior Choir (Year 7 and 8) and the Junior Choir (Year 5 and 6). All five of us girls from Selwyn House had been in the Junior Choir at least once before, so this year, we were auditioning for the Senior Choir.

We recently received the results from the auditions with four of us getting through into the Senior Choir. Us four will all be in the Music Festival, and have special practices most Saturdays starting on the 16th of August. We’ll also have a 3 day holiday programme/practice in the September holidays, so we can learn the 3 songs that the Senior Choir sings in their bracket. Here are some photos from last year and the year before.

The Senior Choir will be performing on three nights at 7:00pm, from the 29th of October to the 31st of October, along with other Christchurch Schools performing in the Massed Choir. If you would like to come and watch us perform, click Here for information about the Music Festival Tickets.

http://musicfestival.school.nz/?page_id=1142

Hattie

Minimakers at the MakerCrate!

The Makercrate on PhotoPeach

Every Wednesday, we go to the Makercrate in the Pallet Pavillion to do a workshop. What is the Makercrate? Well, the MakerCrate was created so that anyone can go there to 3D print, play with Hama beads, tinker with arduinos and laser cutters. We both love the MakerCrate- we are both very techy. Here is a PhotoPeach of some of the things we’ve created.

Bridget McKendry runs the MakerCrate. She’s also very techy and geeky. Each week, we work on a different project- so far, we’ve done 3D printing and Hama beads. This week, we are going to make a light up redstone ore that glows when on a platform. We really love the MakerCrate- come and visit Bridget and her volunteers at the MakerCrate. The MakerCrate is open 7 days a week.

What’s your favourite project? Tell us in the comments below. We will keep you updated on the sessions each week.

By Enya and Hattie

Nao Robotics

Nao At Robotics

On Friday after school, the Robotics club had four special guests come in. Two of them were human, and the other two were... well, humanoid. Both of us were in awe- two people from Science Alive had brought it two Nao robots (if you want to know what a Nao is, click here). We both love Nao robots because they have a massive range of capabilities. They showed us some demonstrations of what a Nao can do. Here is a montage of some of the clips we took:

After they showed us the capabilities of a Nao robot, we got to program some simple things on the Nao. We worked on a blue Nao called Freddie. We managed to get it to recite the first few lines of Star Wars, say our names using voice recognition and get it to say the first verse of “Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?”. We all had lots of fun, and they are coming back this Friday- We have plans for robot Gangnam Style!

By Hattie and Enya