This is going to be my (Catherine's) part of the last post (Shaun's Post includes all of the coding etc.) We combined our blogging, but We both thought that we would create respective posts according to our strengths. In my case, this means the White House model and the iMovie videos. We really enjoyed seeing everyone's projects. It was clear that everyone had spent a lot of time on theirs and all of the ideas were really different. In particular, I loved Hilary's illustrated story- as someone who often has a lot of papers to mark, I really wish I could show this to all of the kids. Instead of a boring and grumpy presentation about footnotes, the illustrations would make it much more fun. I also really liked Heather's Baseball helmet, what a great way to get people of all ages involved in themed exhibits. Also, for me swinging at nothing is probably the only time I'll ever hear a home run announcement....
For our model, we decided to include:
1. The Blue Room
2. The Red Room
3. The Green Room
4. The Roosevelt Room
We originally had thought of different rooms to create, but decided that four rooms that were all significantly different in their decor would probably be a better bet. Making the model was much harder than we initially believed it would be... It's much easier to envision the rooms etc. coming together than actually implementing it. If time had allowed, we would have loved to order some playmobile furniture that would have worked with each of the rooms, and then we could have put light fixtures in the lights. This would help correspond the room in the model to the room on the screen.
Here is a picture of the Red Room (bottom) and the Blue Room (above)
The house was made up of two pieces (so we could carry it from room to room.) The first piece was the lawn and the bottom part of the patio with the pillars. The second part was the model with the four rooms (propped up by another piece of foam core.)
This is what everything looked like when it was connected. We took some of the clips we used and edited them using iMovie. iMovie was easy enough to figure out, so we added music to some of the clips and then combined them to make a larger film. There was commentary on many of the videos already, but we would have liked to do the voice overs ourselves as well as the music, so we would just be keeping the visuals. I'll include the links for a clip from the Blue Room as well as the Red Room below (we didn't get to play them through during our presentation.) We don't own the content, so I thought It would be better to link rather than post it directly.
The Blue Room:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oVVJLBprDs
The Red Room:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQxHac5hTwk
Final Thoughts,
I know both Shaun and I had a lot of fun in this class. Not only was it great to be able to do something different, but it was also nice to be able to learn something new every class. Even though sometimes the glitches (or our overall inability to figure out Firmata) were sometimes frustrating, getting through these pitfalls made for a rewarding experience. Now we just have to figure out how to get the White House out of Shaun's office... If anyone wants to recreate Independence Day, let us know!
