I took one of the upper school classes this afternoon for an extra ICT session, and chose to focus on the 2Design and Make application within 2Simples Online Tools that we can access through our school website.
The class have already used 2D&M effectively recently, when they were working on their car chassis topic as they created a body for their chassis using 2D&M (you can see my thoughts on that work here), so I decided that the children should use one of the new templates recently added to 2D&M - the train template.
I had created a local train livery (if you're wondering, it's the livery for East Midlands Trains) earlier in the day and displayed that on the IWB as I introduced them to the lesson whilst reminding them about some of the tips and tricks with using 2D&M (such as sorting out the main colour scheme using the first screen, before moving to the "paint net" screen and making use of the symmetry button to add more detail).
The children were then given the choice of either creating their own train livery, or using the EMT livery and taking the net of the train and creating their 3D model. I was pleased to see around a 50 - 50 split in the class, and so was able to capture some excellent images of both design and construction taking place.
One trick I did use today, was to print out the net of the shape onto an A3 sheet of paper - not the standard A4. This meant that the finished models would be built twice as big as normal, and are also less fiddly for the children to work with.
The children enjoyed their work - and some even came up with ideas on how to connect their trains together to form 2 or 3 car units (a simple glued tab from the front of one train to the back of the next worked brilliantly). Of course they are also able to go home and continue their livery designs as Online Tools is a web based resource we use as part of our learning resources.
Maybe now we need to design and build a station, platforms and rails to complete the effect!
