Present your pepeha using code!

Introduction:

Pepeha is a way of introducing yourself in Māori. It tells people who you are by sharing your connections with the people and places that are important to you. In this lesson students use photography, Keynote and Scratch coding, to animate themselves walking and sharing their pepeha.

The Mānawatu is my river.

Learning Objectives: 

In this lesson, students will illustrate their understanding of block coding and ways to digitally represent the significant people and places in their lives. Students will create a multimedia interactive animation that shares their pepeha. I would recommend this mostly for Year 5-8 students. This lesson can be adapted by changing which aspects you include or leave out (eg voice recordings).  You can create backgrounds usings photos or use your favourite app to draw them. 

Students will be taking photos, using Keynote to remove backgrounds, exporting images and using block code on the Scratch website. Students will use images, text bubbles and voice overs to communicate their pepeha.

Introducing my family.

The Process: 

1. Students work in pairs to take photos of each other in walking poses.
2. Add these to a Keynote, one per slide.
3. Remove the background and make the slides transparent. Upload to Scratch as a sprite, add the extra photos as costumes.
4. Code the sprite. Add 2 arrows to control the sprite. Code the arrows.
5. Create backgrounds for their pepeha such as their; river, mountain, school, home, marae. 

(more details are in the attached Keynote).

This is my school.

Reflection:

I have now worked through this project with two different groups. I have done my best to get the code working well but I am sure other people will find ways to make it work even better! The students and I have worked together to improve the steps and code. The code examples I have shared in the Keynote slidedeck were functional when I posted this. For this project I let the students choose how to create their backgrounds and I would love to explore different ways of creating the backgrounds next time. Students were very engaged and there was lots of positive feedback from families about their completed projects.

Attachments

Digital Pepeha steps .key

Download  (7.3 MB)