International Grades - Open Technologies

I found out after I started this work that it would have been better to do it before doing the bearings work. Some of the things needed in the bearings work are also needed in constructing triangles and it seems a better order to do the angles first, then the triangles then the bearings. I also found a bug in the software! Its not too serious but when you press escape in OpenOffice Impress after running the first slide the whole program crashes. It recovered the work though so I didn't lose anything. I tried it with a different file and I couldn't make it happen again so I think it is something to do with the things on the slides in my constucting triangles file because it always happens with this file. I asked Mr Carrera and he said I should file a bug with the Quality Assurance team at Open Office. This was not too difficult. I had to fill in a form on their web site saying which version of the program I was using. I put a screen shot below.

Click image for large version

I got an E-mail from one of the engineers saying they had been trying to find this bug for a while and my file helped them so it will be fixed in the next main version in a few weeks time. I'm really pleased I was able to help make the software better for everyone. I think this also shows I meet some of the criteria for the national occupational standards for IT practitioners

Diagnostic process Level 2

• information gathering
• information analysis
• solution identification
• fault validation
• how to minimise service disruption during diagnostics

Gathering and recording technical information Level 2

• identifying the relevant information
• approved sources of information
• validating information

For IT users Advice Level 2

• Where and how to find advice on common errors with most hardware and software.
• Collaborative technologies Level 2
• Activating information-sharing equipment.

The work I did on constructing triangles is in the attached file. It required similar skills to the previous work except I had to work out how to draw a protractor because I couldn't find a similar drawing that I could use freely.

Once I started doing the presentation on bearings I realised that there were a lot of different ways that I could do it. I could describe how to use scale drawings using a piece of graph paper, a protractor and a pencil or I could do the scale diagram using the drawing tools in OpenOffice. I decided that using OpenOffice would be best because with these tools its much easier to draw a very accurate scale drawing. I am not very good with a pencil so I think using the computer is better especially since the software is free. I can't really think why anyone still uses paper and pencil for this type of drawing. I started by just creating lines about the right length and dragging them to the right position rotating them using the mouse. I found that I could put in very exact positions sizes and angles using the position and size dialogue which is got by pressing f4. Sometimes this took a bit to understand because the software rotates everything anti-clockwise but bearings go clockwise from North. It woould be better if I could set the software to rotate lines starting vertical and move clockwise but I did not find a way of doing this. In other ways the software made things easy. I could specify exactly where I wanted the ends of lines to be to 0.1 mm which is much better than I could draw with a pencil. It might seem that the software takes away the need to know the maths but I think I had a much better idea about angles after doing this work because I had to sometimes work out differences and negative angles because of the direction of rotation.

Bearings are angles measured from the North line. They are useful for navigation and they are used in the KS3 maths strategy to show an application of measuring angles. I will use OpenOffice.org Impress again to provide some animated diagrams to teach some basic navigation using bearings.

I think it will be a bit easier this time as I learnt about getting the order of things right when planning the first slide and I don't have to spend time deciding on backgrounds.

I started my work on angles using OpenOffice.org Impress 2.0. First I found out what I had to cover. I decided on measuring angles because it was something that people seemed to want and I know enough to get started. Mr Carrera told me it is useful for people to be able to give a reasonable guess at the size of an angle and also to be able to use some of the special words associated with angles such as acute, reflex and obtuse angles. He lent me a book about angles that gave me some ideas. I started by making a title page. I wasn't sure to start with whether to design a fancy background so I tried one or two but decided that they made the diagrams and text more difficult to read. I decided to keep things simple and just use black on a white background and to maybe use some small bits of colour to highlight things. If anyone wants fancy backgrounds they can always edit my work. It took me just over an hour to decide on the way I would lay things out. I learnt that it can take quite a long time to get something done that looks really simple! It took me another hour and a half to get the animations to work properly. This was quite fiddly. I have not used any sound effects because they take attention away from what I am trying to get across. So I have finished my first slide and I have attached it here. If you want to try it out you need OpenOffice.org 2.0 or higher. You can download this for free from www.openoffice.org. Here is a screen shot.

My proposed project

My Gold INGOT project is to provide some presentations to help teachers and students with maths learning. I decided to do this project because I am interested in maths and I noticed that a lot of teachers have to write up the same explanations for the class on the white boards time and time again. I thought it would be easier if there were freely available presentations to do this. I have asked some teachers in my school and I have decided to cover work in the 11-14 age group using the UK government's Key Stage 3 numeracy strategy as a guide. I think it will help me revise some of the maths I learnt earlier as well as being useful to other people. I won't be able to cover everything but perhaps some other people will add to my work so we can cover more and more of what is needed.