Pixeled Multimedia Teachers Association

On Friday May 26th there was a girls conference held at Swinburne University. The conference was part of the More Bytes research project which involves seven schools in Victoria that are hoping to discover strategies to encourage girls to study IT and Multimedia at University and a career in the industry. The age range of the girls was from year 8 to 10 and they were drawn from a variety of backgrounds. Some were from private schools whilst others were attending educational facilities from low socio-economic environments. The schools involved included Merrilands, La Trobe Secondary College, Banksia College, Wesley College, Warrandyte High School, Shepparton High School and Fitzroy High School. There was also a video link up with students from Fitzroy Crossing District School in Western Australia.

The morning started with an address from the Dean of the Multimedia Faculty and then continued with the girls showing short films. The films were made by the students about their schools. This was followed by the girls splitting into groups and using Macromedia Flash to create a t-shirt design. Most girls worked well on creating a unique design with the theme of girls in IT. The adults in involved in the program were busy trying to transfer the designs from the computer to a t-shirt, not an easy task with 90 girls involved in the project.

After lunch the group was bought back together to listen to a discussion from women currently working in the industry. One was a graphic designer from Paris who showed her interactive website. The other was a film maker who spoke of using her film background to create multimedia. The women were inspiring the girls were interesteand th The feedback from the day was positive witd in the way in which multimedia draws from many creative strands. At the conclusion of the conference the girls filled out a questionairre about the success of the day and most of the feedback was positive.

The project will continue with girls currently studying at Swinburne acting as mentors to the girls at high school. This will involve a number of projects that will be guided by the mentors but will include networking the girls across the different schools.

Its been an interesting project to be involved in and I'll be going up to Fitzroy Disctrict High School in Fitzroy Crossing to teach the girls there how to use Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver. I'll keep you posted.

TopScreens opened the other night at ACMI. Great to see the Media work - there must have been 12 to 15 movies, some of fantastic quality including Flash animation and stop motion animation. They have been showing at TopDesigns as well, I am told, so they have received lots of exposure.
After viewing the movies we were invited down to the memory grid for refreshments and to view the Multimedia work. All around the walls are screens showing excerpts from - you guessed it - the movies! Three computers showed the eight pieces of MM, and you couldn't get near them for people, which was good because they were caught up in playing the games, but frustrating because I didn't get a chance to check out the work from other schools. I would not recommend it as an excursion, unless you are taking only about 10 kids and have something else to do in the city as well.
I have spoken to Merren Rickettson from VCAA Season of Excellence about the possibility of showing the MM work up there with the Media by video-capturing a run-through of each of the games etc. This would allow them to be seen by a much wider audience, including non-gamers. What do other people think?

I took my students into ACMI for the Machinima workshops on Tuesday and we all had a lot of fun. Basically, the students were taken through some of the history of machinima, the current trends, improvements and festivals that were now happening around the world devoted to this new form of machine and cinema (hence the name machinima). The students were given a couple of hours to put together a film in a game called Moviemaker. Basically, this game is based on running a movie studio and looks a little bit like The Sims. There is a setting in the game that just allows you to make movies, giving you lots of scenes, genres, actors, set designs and options for various scenarios. Once the students make the movie they then put it into post production where you can add subtitles and audio, including narration or voiceovers. The students came up with a mixed bag of films but they really enjoyed messing around with the softwareare. I can see a lot of uses for this software as an educational tool, not only in Multimedia but in the humanities area as well. One of the movies that was on display was set in World War 1 during the amnesty on Christmas Day between the allied soldiers and the Germans. The story involved a bit of the history of the war and then how the amnesty affected the soldiers. IT was a really moving piece. Obviously a story like that couldn't be done in a couple of hours but nonetheless my students came up with som funny stories. It was well worth the $16.00 a head and I also got to make a short film (bonus).