Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Have You Heard The News?

The news is about to be delivered!  The PNG Lab transformed into a newsroom today as our editors furiously wrote the next PNG News Broadcast.




Filming starts on Thursday (news moves a little slower around these parts) and you can expect to see some results by next Tuesday or Thursday depending on how well the students transition from being copy editors to film editors.

News.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Mixing it Up

We spent more time mixing it up today.  We're getting closer to being finished with our songs.  The students could probably keep working on them forever and never be finished.

Towards the end of class Brian explained the concept of audio mixing to the class and now we are hard at work trying to master these songs and make them sound better by adjusting the audio levels for each instrument track.  If we finish soon perhaps we can post a few of them to our SoundCloud page for you to hear!

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Getting Crafty With The Mixes!

Today the students tried their hand at making their own song mix using the samples in Acoustica Mixcraft's sound library.

This particular challenge was to use only sounds from the sample library and to construct a song using a specific tempo and key.

The results were pretty impressive.  We also had a few students who used the Instrument Track function of Mixcraft to play notes on a virtual instrument using their keyboard.

We're going to keep working on this next time and maybe we'll even start recording some live sounds to add in to our songs!

Thursday, March 13, 2014

MixCraft it up!

So today was like garbage truck full of highly sensitive plastic explosives falling off a cliff into a densely populated minefield with an atom bomb in the center for good measure.

There was a lot of noise... I guess is what I would want you to take away from that.

But the UPSIDE is everyone got comfortable with MixCraft, our music creation, remixing, editing and recording software and they all seemed to have a good time with it.

Next class we begin getting serious with our beats and constructing full songs with a set of qualifications and parameters.

Its going to be great! See you then!

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Ko-du Back Again!

We continued to our Kodu levels and some even attempted to branch out into multiple levels. The designs are becoming more sophisticated and the game play more complex. I don't know why but everybody was incredibly quiet during class. I was beginning to get paranoid. Not gonna lie.

Next class we begin music and perhaps we'll have time toward the end of the semester to complete more Kodu.

Big ups to Microsoft.

Peace!





Thursday, March 6, 2014

You Do Kodu!

Today we totally shifted gears and the kids tried their hands at Microsoft's free programming software for kids from their Research Lab.  It's called Kodu.

The kids are able to create their own world all the way down to what kinds of trees and rocks are in the world.

Needless to say they took to it instantly and got busy creating their own worlds and programming the behavior of the characters in those worlds.

We're going to keep going into the next class.  Who knows what they'll come up with.






Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Poster Session

We got some actual results today.  Lots of posters printed.  There's always room for improvement, so the kids started new posters after the old ones finished printing.