The rationale

At The Holy Cross School, we needed to find a way of improving our Year 9 ICT levels in what used to be called “Control Technology”, now called “Making Things Happen”. We were all heartily fed up with those traffic lights, and that washing machine….

Assuming that PowerPoint is a computer program (I use the term loosely), and assuming that we were creating a series of original animations, we argued that an animation sequence could be called a sub-routine within the main program. Ergo, two original animations within PowerPoint would be two sub-routines, and qualify the student for a level 6. This neat trickery has been confirmed by several bemused ICT advisers. (“I’ve never thought of it in that way before, but, hmmmm, yes..…”)

We also wanted to create a series of support files for young students of English, in China. If we could develop a set of stories that would sit happily on the web, we could actually build an on-line, bi-lingual, audio-visual library, and at no cost to either country. Teachers in China would be able to download the stories for their pupils to read in class, and these stories would benefit from having been created by their peers in another country. It also meant that pupils in the two countries would be collaborating on the same original texts. And having fun with the visual, animation aspects, of course.