Whittlesea Tech School

Maker Faire FLIPPED Online Workshop 

In spite of lockdown restrictions, ESC student tech school ambassadors managed to attend their second workshop via Zoom - albeit online, less hands-on and at home in comfy home clothes. Thank goodness for technology!

Student tech school ambassadors from ESC, as well as from other schools, were grouped into teams and were able to discuss, in Zoom breakout rooms, what they could plan to make for the upcoming Maker Faire in November. They were also able to vote on what they wanted to skill up in in tech programs such as Adobe Illustrator, Makecode Arcade and TinkerCAD.

As Takshay in 9A describes, “… we went through a variety of things. We discussed what we were going to create for the maker faire, had an icebreaker activity and had a skill up session. I was in the illustrator skill up and we learnt how to make stickers. I enjoyed having the tech school staff come up with a fun icebreaker activity which was a scavenger hunt. We had to find items that fit a certain description from our house.” James in 8A also shared.

Paxton in 7A described that for him, “The best part was when we chose what we will do for our activity and I chose to do the Makecode Arcade so I could learn basic game coding”. 8F’s Theo managed to create a trivia game on Greek gods and heroes using the same program!

As described by 7B’s Pele, “Maker Faire FLIPPED was flipped so that secondary students could participate, including me. What we did was very limited due to the fact that it was lockdown and we weren’t onsite. … The one I participated in was the Makecode Arcade and I made a maze (speedrun, it’s free!). Skills that I have learnt is a bit more information about coding and making a game of my own. An aspect that I found really fun was participating in an online whiteboard where we could write down what we wanted to do. I’m really looking forward to seeing the robots at the next Maker Faire onsite, and the VR simulators.”

Hanifa Achmad

Tech School Coordinator

Pele’s Super Kirby Bros game

7E Naman’s Payday 3 game is a work in progress

Another game from Pele – this maze was tricky to get through without button mashing!