Forced Perspective is a super fun and interesting photography concept that isn’t all that hard to do, but it does take some practice. Unfortunately, it works best with more than one person, a lot of space, and ideally a good DSLR camera instead of your phone, so I won’t make you do this one, but I certainly will encourage you to give it a try!

Examples:

Brief overview/how-to:

Great examples that you can try:

Here’s some of the most important advice I can offer you. It’s simple:

CLEAN YOUR PHONE OFTEN

Would you put your face up against a toilet seat? Probably not.

But, did you know that you can find MORE bacteria on your phone than you can on the average toilet seat? Eeeewww. You put that thing near your face a lot. Even if you never talk on it, you’re constantly touching your phone and then your face. All. Day. Long. You can’t help it!

When you go into a store these days, you almost always have to sanitize your hands. That drives me nuts, because one of the first things people often do when they enter the store is touch their phone or their wallet or keys or something like that, and you immediately contaminate the hands that you just cleaned!

Obviously, COVID-19 has drastically increased the danger in touching an unclean surface, but even if it wasn’t an issue or you have both shots or whatever, you can still protect yourself from a  wide variety of illnesses and issues by CLEANING YOUR PHONE OFTEN!

You can even clean your phone really well just soap, water, and a clean microfiber cloth

Recently I discovered the greatest inventor of all time. Forget Alexander Graham Bell or Leonardo Da Vinci or Elon Musk, Matty Benedetto beats them all:

https://www.youtube.com/c/UnnecessaryInventions/featured 

https://www.instagram.com/unnecessaryinventions/

Sure, most of his inventions are pretty unnecessary, but some of them are kind of genius.

I can think of a bunch of students and adults who could really use one of these:

Check out the iDangle

the Slice Slicer

the Chip Extractor

Or one that I bet a lot of you could use, the Marathon Untility Controller

See! The guy’s got solutions to problems that you didn’t even know you had! Genius!

I want you to come up with an invention like his. It could be unnecessary or something that you could actually use!

Ideas:
Ways to make it look like you’re paying attention in a Teams meeting when you’re not? (actually, he’s got something kind of along those lines too!)

Corona Virus personal protective gear

School supplies that do your homework

Ways to keep your room clean without doing any work

etc.

 

Here’s the steps you need to follow:

1. Figure out what the problem is that you wish to solve with your invention. Every good design starts with a problem that we need to solve. You’ll need to be able to explain the issue.
2. Design your invention on Tinkercad. I want a 3D model that shows me what your invention looks like.
3. Explain how your invention solves the problem. How is it going to make life better? How does it work? What will this invention allow you to do that you couldn’t before?
4. Present your idea! You could make a video commercial explaining the problem and your solution. Or you could make a detailed PowerPoint where you design the slides yourself (choose your own backgrounds, fonts, colours, etc.) and add transitions and animations to make it look great. Or you could design an effective poster using Word or something like that, where you have photos or screenshots and information about your product.

 

I want to look at some examples and hear some presentations on June 9 and 10, so you need this done before June 9. You do not have to present to the class or show your work, but I am really hopeful that some people will. Your mark will be better if I can ask you questions and you can explain yourself.

We’ll talk more about it in our meetings leading up to those days.

Good luck and I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

If you take a moment and create or sign in to an account, you can save your progress so you won’t have to start over again next time you practice.

If you have not done so already, please Join our class: https://studio.code.org/join/MXZXTS
(you may have created your own account already. If you have forgotten how to log in, please contact Mr. Robson via email or on social media and he can look it up for you)

If you’ve already joined, you can SIGN IN here

If you prefer to pick your own path, go here: https://code.org/student/middle-high

Many more cool options here (Minecraft, Star Wars, sports, Flappy Bird, etc.) https://hourofcode.com/ca/learn

OR you can try it out at Code Combat (a bit more challenging): https://codecombat.com/students?_cc=FireSideDust

OR you can try it out at CodeHS (a bit more challenging): https://codehs.com/go/FA299

You may also like:

Coding with Grasshopper: A great program available in browsers or as a free app on iOS and Android.

If you have a computer with a keyboard, please spend some time learning to type!

Typing Club – learn how to type with guided lessons. Very valuable practice. Unfortunately only really useful on a computer/laptop keyboard. Sign-in is the SAME as your computer user name and password! All students are registered already and simply need to sign in.

 

In order to do a good job of this project, you will need to review the Photoshop Selection Tools post. Those tools will be essential if you are going to do a good job of this, because every sign is a little different, so these instructions will not tell you how to do this step-by-step!

For this assignment, you will take a photograph of a sign and modify it to remove elements and add in new elements that look realistic. PLEASE USE ONE OF THE PHOTOS I HAVE PROVIDED. If you want to use something else, you MUST DISCUSS IT WITH ME FIRST.

Click this link to choose one of these signs, please

It is possible that you MIGHT find something useful on Unsplash. If you want to look there, you can, but you NEED TO SHOW ME YOUR SIGN FIRST. I will tell you whether it’ll work or not. https://unsplash.com/s/photos/sign

Your job is to match new text and elements to whatever is on the original sign.

Some tips:

You can use Photoshop one of two ways:

QUICKLY or WELL

Guess which one I want… If you’re doing this quickly and get it done in a few minutes, it’s going to look terrible and I’m going to ask you to do it again. This project should take some serious time and effort. You’re going to mess things up and redo or fix them. It’s part of doing a good job.

You do not need to create a new file. Just open the sign image in Photoshop and…

ALWAYS make a copy of the original sign before you start. You should have a layer at the bottom or turned off with the untouched image of the sign!

If it’s obvious that you changed your sign, you did not do a good job. If it’s easy to tell what you changed, you did not do a good job. If you did not do a good job, you will have to go back and try again.

Start by CAREFULLY removing elements to replace. Please DO NOT REPLACE EVERYTHING! Your job is to match new elements with what is already there, so don’t get rid of everything!

When it comes time to add new text, make sure that it is a font that looks the same and is EXACTLY the same colour, and the same size as what was on the sign originally

As always, when your project is complete you need to hand it in to your OneDrive shared folder AND post the project on your Edublogs site!

Examples:

Previous student examples:

 

 

This year’s Celebration of the Arts is coming up in May, and we need your help to spread the word about this great event! We’d like you to create a poster on Photoshop Elements informing people about the event and getting them interested in attending.

You will make this using the same steps as the GWMS Poster assignment. Look back at those instructions for help with how to do this.

Your poster should be set up the same size as the GWMS poster you did previously:

17 inches high x 11 inches wide

or

11 inches high x 17 inches wide

Or, if you think you can do a really great job of designing something beautiful and exciting, try a bigger size if you want:

24 inches high x 18 inches wide (or 18 inches high x 24 inches wide)

Here are some examples of a few of the better posters last year (click them to see them bigger):

REMEMBER: the information in the posters above is for LAST YEAR. DON’T COPY IT.

This year the Art Show details are:

**********************************

GWMS Celebration of the Arts
May 14, 2020
6:30-8:30pm
Doors open at 6pm

visual art, band, drama, a movie premiere, and Dance.

Cost:
$5 per child (5 years old and under free)
$10 per adult
*$25 per family ($30 at the door)
*(max. 5 people; 2 adults, 3 children)

Payments can be made through School Cash On-line on our school website or here: http://bit.ly/gwmspayments

or tickets can be purchased by cash or cheque at our school office

**********************************

Any images used need to be high quality, and copyright free/creative commons. Use one of these sites:

https://unsplash.com/

https://www.pexels.com/

http://compfight.com/

Or, even better, ask to borrow a camera and take a picture of some artwork, dancers, or the school!

Now that you’ve demonstrated a mastery of some important and impressive skills in Microsoft Word, it’s time to put those skills to work to design an amazing, useful document of your own!

You’ll design a restaurant menu, business price list, or some creative way of demonstrating your knowledge.

Here’s my example. Yours does not have to be exactly the same (and it SHOULD NOT BE):

Displaying the invisible characters, it looks like this:

You can make up your own store/business or create a menu for a restaurant using this format. Have fun and be creative, but you MUST INCLUDE:

• Text formatting (font, colour, size, alignment)
• Pictures (behind text and square or tight)
• Text box(es) (including borders and shading)
• Hyperlink(s)
• TABS TABLE! (I set tabs to line up my artist (left), title (center), and price (right) – yours can have more/different columns, but you NEED TO SET TABS somewhere)
• Bonus for more tricks & tools that you used in the previous assignment, so add in more of the things that you’ve learned!

Two more sections to go! The first one is pretty easy (you’ve done it before!)

First, position your cursor wherever you want your table to go

Make sure you’re on the Insert tab/menu, and click on the Table box. Your table should be 4 x 4

Type or copy and paste to put your headings in your table. You can do it two different ways:

Most common:

but if you want to be a little different, this works too:

Then just go fill it in. You don’t really need to ask 3 people. Feel free to just make up answers and put those in (I did!)

The table is a bit hard to read unless you make the headings stand out from the data. Highlight those headings

And then use the paint bucket to shade those boxes in

and center the text inside of the cells

That looks MUCH better:

 

SETTING TAB STOPS

This is another way of making a table that can be much more effective and useful. It also tends to look pretty good if you do it right. It is new and kind of difficult the first time, but I’ll show you exactly what to do.

Something that really helps when you’re working on this section is to turn on the button that shows you all of the characters in your document that are normally invisible, like spaces, every time you hit enter, and every time you hit tab.

Normally, when you’re typing out information for this type of table (as you will do in your next assignment… hint hint…), you would type an entry then press tab, type the next bit of information, then press tab again, and so on. I’ve inserted the tilde character ~ to show you where the tabs should go

So the first thing we need to do is get rid of those tildes and put the tabs in. Luckily, there’s an easy way to do it all at once.

Make sure you’re on the Home tab

Over on the right, you’ll look for the button that says Replace

You want to search for and replace all of the tildes, so that goes in the top box where it says Find what:

You want to Replace with: the tab character. If you just press the tab key in the box, it exits out of the box, so that doesn’t work. There are two ways to do this instead:

Down at the bottom of the box, you can click More >>

then 

and look for Tab character

OR

You can type in (or copy from here…) ^t

Your box will look like this:

Then you want to Replace All

If you have that Show/Hide button on, your paragraph will look like this: (the arrows represent the tab character

Without that button on, it looks like this:

Hopefully, you still have your Ruler showing, because you’re really going to need it

Right now, those tabs are stopping all over the place, so the paragraph is a big mess. but we can tell the Tab key to stop in specific spots to line things up properly.

Look at the very top of the ruler on the left-hand side of your page. You’ll see a little character that might look like an L (although it could be something else…)

that little L represents a Left tab stop. It will line things up on their left-hand side. The first step is to go and set 5 of these stops on the ruler. Yours DO NOT have to be in the exact same spot as mine, because we will end up moving them later anyway

The first one goes really close to the margin. Go and click on the top ruler somewhere between the margin and 1. 

the next one should go somewhere around 5

the third one put around 11 or so

I’ll put the third one around 18

The last one should go right near the right-hand side of the margin

Now we need to change some of those stops to line up in different ways. In order to do this, on the Home tab/menu, right below where you’d add borders or shading, in the Paragraph section, click the little box with a diagonal downward-facing arrow:

That opens this box:

Down in the bottom left corner, there’s a Tabs… button. Press it:

That will show you a list of the stops that are currently set and will allow you to move, change, or delete them

I have given you instructions explaining which types of stops I want. The first one is called Decimal. It’s good if you are working with numbers, because they will always be lined up along the decimal point

I have the first one set at .5 cm. (yours might be slightly different) Whatever your first one is, make sure it’s selected (click on it if not)

Down in the Alignment section, you can choose where that stop lines up. Click Decimal

Then move on to the second one and select it. Mine is at 5 cm

This one should be lined up on the left

My third one is at 11 cm. It should be Center aligned

My third one is at 17.75 cm. It should also be Center

My last one is at 24.75 and it needs to be Right aligned

NOTE: if your stops get really messed up or you end up with too many or something is wrong, you can always Clear a stop by choosing it and clicking Clear

If you need to start all over again, just click Clear All

Once you’ve set your stops like mine, things should actually look pretty good already. The table of information is now lined up and organized

I don’t really like how my last two columns are so close together

I’m going to go up to my ruler, find the second last one, and move it over to the left.

NOTE: you have to be very careful clicking right on the ruler. If you click right on the little symbol, it’ll work fine. If you click close to the symbol, it’ll add a new stop and will cause problems. Make sure you only have 5 at all times. If you add one by mistake, you can go back into the Tabs box and clear it OR just carefully pull it down off the ruler.

I started here:

And moved it here.

Now I have a decent amount of space between the last two columns

I find my second and third stops a little too close as well

So I’ll move that second one over to the left a tiny bit.

Start:

Finish:

That looks much better to me

Now my list of stops looks like this (again, yours might be slightly different)

When I turn on that Show all characters button

The table now looks like this:

NOTE: Sometimes things won’t be lined up still. Occasionally when you’re typing in your information, you’ll accidentally get two Tabs inserted where there should only be one, and things will not line up properly

If that’s the case, you need to remove one of those Tabs to make things line up

The final step is to take the headings for the table and make them stand out from the data below so that it’s easier to read and understand.

Highlight the top row

and change the colour, make it bold, underline it, or somehow change the look so that it’s obviously different from the data below. I’ll make mine Bold (Ctrl + B) and Underline it (Ctrl + U)

 

Take a minute to scroll through your document and make sure that everything is done and everything looks good. Move things around or make changes if you need to.

Once you’re done, SAVE your work. CLOSE the file. Follow the steps to DROP OFF.

My finished document looks like this: wordskills

PAGE LAYOUT

Switch to the Layout tab/menu

Change the Orientation to Landscape

Change the Margins to Narrow

Normally you should set your margins and orientation BEFORE you start a document because things will move around after you make that change. Scroll up through your document and see if anything looks bad now.

My shape moved over into the margin, which doesn’t look good, so I should move it.

 

INDENTS

For this section, you really want to make sure that you can see the rulers at the top of your page. Usually they’re on automatically, but you can check by going into the View menu/tab

Make sure that Ruler is turned on

There are 3 ways to indent a paragraph. To choose your paragraph to indent, you DO NOT need to highlight just put your cursor in there anywhere

There are 3 different points on the left-hand side of the ruler at the margin. There is a triangle pointing down, a triangle pointing up, and a little rectangle on the bottom.

The most common type of indent is just to move the first line over and leave the rest alone. You can accomplish this by moving the downward-facing triangle or just going to the start of a paragraph and pushing the Tab key. You don’t have to demonstrate that for this assignment.

 

To indent the entire paragraph, use the rectangle at the bottom and slide it to the right on the ruler.

That will move the entire paragraph over

 

Again, put your cursor in the paragraph you want to indent

And this time, grab the upward facing triangle. NOTE: the three pieces are VERY close together. I find the Hanging Indent to be the most difficult because you have to precisely position your cursor to grab that pointer.

Click right on that upward triangle and move it over. The downward facing triangle should stay where it is.

This will leave the first line alone and move all other lines over.

 

HYPERLINKS

To insert a Hyperlink, you’ll need to go on the Internet and find the website that you wish to link to. For the first one, you need to find the St. James Collegiate website

At the top of the screen is the address of the site. Click it and it should turn blue (click and drag across to highlight if not)

COPY that (right click OR Ctrl + C)

Go back to your document. You need to highlight the text that you want to attach the link to.

The easy way to add a link is to press Ctrl + K. You may also go into the Insert tab/menu

and click Link

click in the Address box

and Paste in the address you copied (right click OR Ctrl + V)

Once you press OK, you’ll see that the text  turned blue and has a line under it. If you click on that text, it should take you to the website.

Do the same thing for George Waters and Mister Robson.

 

WORD ART

There are two ways of doing this, and your preference depends on what you want to do with the word art.

Method 1: highlight the text

On the Home tab in the area where you changed the font & size, you’ll find a blue block letter A. Click that and you can choose one of the pre-made styles or you can play with the different options below

If you use that method, your text is just like any other text, except it’ll be a bit fancier.

Another way of doing this allows you to move the text around like a picture.

To do this, you will want to highlight the block of text and CUT (Ctrl + X) it

Switch to the Insert tab/menu

Over where you made your text box, you’ll find a Word Art button

That’ll give you many of the same options as you saw in method 1. Choose one and it’ll create a text box for you in that style.

Paste your text into that box, and now you can move it around like any other text box or picture, which allows you to do more with it

IMAGES

Go to Google Images and search for a musician or band (or actor or character or whatever) that you really like.

Below the search box, click Tools

To find the best quality images, click on Size and choose Large

Optional: If you chose a cartoon character or animal or logo of some kind, you may wish to find one that has a transparent background. To do this, click on Color and choose Transparent

Once you find an image that you would like to use, click on it and you will see a preview on the right. Right click on that and choose Save Image As (or Save Picture As)

If you’re using Firefox or Chrome, you may be asked where you want to save the file. If you don’t necessarily need it after today, you can go ahead and save it in Downloads. If you want to use it again sometime, you can save it in your Documents folder.

   

While you’re on the Google Image results, you need to click on the link to visit the site where the picture originates because I want a link to the picture’s source

Underneath the photo on the right, you will see the title of the site where it comes from, and it will be a link that you will click on

Go to that site and copy the address, just like you did when you were adding Hyperlinks before

Moving back to your document, you need to be on the Insert tab/menu and choose Pictures

Go find the photo (probably in Downloads)

   

And insert it 

If you’ve chosen a large, high quality photo, you may wish to resize it. Click on the photo and you will see little bubbles around it. Grab a corner bubble and bring it in to make it smaller (NOTE: NEVER try to stretch a photo this way!)

Now you need to Insert a Link, just like you did on text earlier

If you hover your cursor over top of the image, you should now see the address of the page in a little box. NOTE: that link/address should NOT say Google anywhere in it. Google just shows you where to get the photo, no photos are actually housed by Google

 

PHOTO LAYOUT AND TEXT WRAPPING

Now you need to change how that photo sits on your page and what happens to the text near it.

To do that, click on the picture to select it and you should see this little box near the top right corner:

To position text around the photo, choose either Tight (this looks neat with a transparent background, say around a logo or animal) or Square

Now you’ll see the text wrap around the image

You will insert another photo in the background of your page

This time, change the position to be Behind Text

The photo will probably make your text really hard to read, so it’s important to fade it out

When you click on the image, you’ll see the Picture Tools/Format tab/menu

There you will find Color options

Hover your mouse over any of the options and it will show you its name. You want the one that looks really faded (Washout)

Which will make it much easier to read the text on your page

Now on to Step 3!