Mary's Meals

As a school we have chosen to support Mary's Meals as our charity this year. This morning, Richard came to speak to us about the work they do. Mary's Meals provide food for children at school in countries where lack of food prevents them from learning. The Scottish charity now provides over half a million meals every day, enabling children to learn, and then get jobs which allow them to feed themselves. Because the charity use locally sourced produce, they can feed a child for a year for as little as £6.50. Richard showed us footage of children in Malawi recording their meals. We feel humbled by their gratitude for such a small meal.






Watch this blog to see how we fundraise for Mary's Meals- Richard has given us some great ideas!






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Primus inter pares?

Here is Lamorna working on an essay discussing the extent to which the power of the cabinet eclipses that of the PM.




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Changing Britain

Here are Lamorna and Zander working on posters to show the key changes and themes in our study of Britain since 1830...






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Prototyping Tablets

In S4 Computing, we have been looking at the process of product and software design. The process begins with Analysis and Design then moves on to Implementation, Testing, Documentation, Evaluation and Maintenance.

As we were looking at Analysis and Design, we decided to look at how you might analyse the way to build a new tablet device. We researched the sizes of today's tablets:

• iPad 2
• Motorola Xoom
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 7"
• Dell Streak 5"
• Amazon Kindle
• BlackBerry PlayBook

We also built models of current mobile phones. Once we had built the models to size out of foamcore board, we sketched their control layout on the board. We designed several "screens" of content on paper and tried them out for ease of use. We looked at the position of the front camera on the devices that had them and noted that some tablets were designed to be held in either landscape or portrait mode.

The big difference came when we made the tablets the correct weight. Using all the plasticine we could find in the school, we loaded up our board models with the appropriate weight and re-evaluated the models.

Suddenly the tablets that had seemed like a great design didn't seem so great any more when they weighed 700g! We looked at the different aspect ratios and argued about whether the Galaxy Tab 10.1's 16:9 screen is overall better than the iPad 2's squarer 10:7 display. We wondered whether anyone could stand to hold a tablet as heavy as the Motorola Xoom for a long time! Finally, we discussed whether a 7" tablet is really big enough to be useful.

So now we're on to implementation, testing, documentation, evaluation and maintenance!

S5 art & chemistry

S5 pupils were working well this afternoon. Lamorna completed her painting very successfully:






Zander completed this oil pastel still life:






And Ailie was busy with some practical experiments, timing and recording the reaction rate.

S3 art

Nico completed this pencil drawing today:



And Kieran completed this one:

Art work

S3 were working hard on some observational drawing this afternoon:



Melissa completed this drawing:



Christopher completed this drawing:



And Alexander in S5 was working on an oil pastel still life of sports equipment: