Digital Leaders Tech Taster Day @ YSJ

Our Year 6 Digital Leaders – and some Year 5s looking forward to being Digital Leaders next year – were lucky to visit the DT Design Centre at York St John for a special technology taster day on the 11th June! They have written a short report below to tell you more…

As we arrived at York St. John University, there was a buzz of excitement; what would our day focused on technology hold?! Before we started, we had an interesting lecture about what Game Design included. They showed us clips of the newest technology like Lego AR (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWo5u6-jmHM) and even spoke about contact lenses that would work like a VR headset. After we felt suitably inspired, we then got started onto our first activities. As we were with two other schools, we were split into two groups for the day; the first activity for Park Grove was the game designing! We worked with Game Design lecturer Andy, and we could add in anything we wanted to our game: lazers, portals, light paths, goo (bounce, speed, death, cleansing and conversion), robots and so much more! Whilst this was happening, groups of two or three were taken out to try out a new piece of technology called Tilt Brush. This VR experience enables you to make 3D drawings. When you put the headset you appear in a blank room and you had an interactive remote. When you held down the trigger and moved it around it would print the shape you drew into the air around you!

After a lovely lunch at the university canteen, we returned to the Design Centre to work with a different lecturer (John Temperton) about another part of game design. This time we focused on how to create our own game characters. To create our own characters we looked at three different areas: animal form, theme and genre. We selected a choice from each category to help structure our design. Our ideas went from a detective, puzzle-solving goldfish to a adventure-seeking, survival bird we even ended up with a fantasy frog seeking his revenge on his enemies… We drew these unique creatures by using two shapes and adapting them to create our individual animals, as we had learnt about a famous artist who created the Disney characters. He drew his famous characters by starting off with two different sized rugby ball shapes. The next step to our afternoon was going into a special room to look at 3D printers, which are used to print organs, models and even chocolate!!! We thoroughly enjoyed our fabulous experience at St Johns University and would love to visit again!

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