Plog

This year’s Bang! Festival at Broadway is going to be a good one - we’re already looking forward to it…  Spread over 3 days, and celebrating it’s 10th birthday, we just can’t wait!

As usual we bombarded them with our recent films! Watch out for a selection of modern day myths - Medusa, Minotaur, Cyclops and Daedalus & Icarus, as well as some living cave art in Stone Age Stories

See you there?!  27th, 28th and 29th of November

Find out what else is on at QUAD or see some of the films we’ll be showing on our vimeo or youtube pages

Inspired by a post we saw on the MAKE: blog, we decided to make our own vibrating robots with Newtons Walk school…

We’ve been looking for an excuse to get stuck into some electronics with a group for a long time - we do a lot of circuit mashing at home - and as they had all just watched Wallee we thought this would be the perfect time.

Soldering in school wasn’t an option so we just used terminal strip to hold the motor, LED and battery clip together. The weight on the end of the motor was a piece of wooden dowel drilled off centre - all easy for the pupils to assemble themselves with a screw little driver. After a busy morning of designing, making, building, wiring, and gluing, we all put our bots to the test in the drawing arena!

If you want to try this yourself use superbright red or yellow LEDs. There isn’t enough juice in 2 batteries to push the motor and blue or white LEDs too. Pupils used whatever they could lay their hands on from our big-plastic-junk-box, and we encouraged them to try different designs to see what worked - shifting the weight and balance, adding legs or ripping them off. It was a lot of fun!

QUAD employ us to work at Newtons Walk. Keep your eyes peeled for more Newtons Walk posts, and an upcoming exhibition at QUAD in July!

We are often asked to work creatively with curriculum subjects.  Recently Newtons Walk pupils were learning about the Victorians, and we were excited to bring their lessons to life with animation!

Ideas of the past became real - thoughts of hot air balloons, Victorian explorers, steam engines and crazy inventions were captured in an animated film, when pupils used drawing, collage, colour, light and shadow to make an old fashioned looking film about what went on 100 years ago!

Our regular work in Newtons Walk PRU is organised by QUAD.

A magical time! We spent 6 days (over as many weeks) with pupils at Newtons Walk school building personal dens: Drawing plans and making models; building with bamboo, willow and cloth.

We set up a small village in the school hall, and projected drawings and animations that the children had made to match the shape of thier structures onto the sheer cloth walls. They could live inside their pictures!

After we’d played inside them, slept, invited our friends over for tea, rigged up a telephone network with tin cans and string and generally had a rum old time; amazingly everyone wanted to take their creations home! Greg the headteacher strapped them to a van and drove around derby installing the dens in gardens and bedrooms.

Quad funded and organised the sessions.

Pupils at Newtons Walk school, became Vikings for a day of film making, pillage and fun…

Over six sessions the small group of pupils turned themselves into Viking Warriors, they forged helmets and weapons, made their shields, capes, tunics and belts and built an (almost) lifesize longboat all with recycled cardboard, plastic and a trusty gluegun!

Newtons Walk is a pupil Referal Unit in Derby, and we were working through, and funded by Quad.