• Teacher training
• ICT equipment in our school

MICROSOFT

CODE WEEK

• This year we organized an event for the European Code Week to involve students aged 10 to 13 in programming by using both a visual environment for coding (i.e. Scratch) and some robots (Lego Mindstorm). More information can be found here.
• Hour of code: watch the activities carried out during the hour of code (one, two,..) 

ARDUINO PROJECTS

• Lab Project 1
• Lab Project 2: a robotic hand driven by Arduino
• Lab Project 3: an automatic ticket management system using Arduino and RFID technology
• Lab Project 4: a wheel robot with a camera on top controlled via USB
• Lab Project 5: a simple game with LEDs, buttons, and Arduino
• Lab Project 6: a breathalyzer that sends recorded data to the Internet using a Web Server

RASPBERRY Pi PROJECTS

• A simple Raspberry Pi project about Analog to Digital conversion: a Temperature sensor connected to a serial Raspberry Pi port driven by a Qt application --> . Watch the video and read the lines of code.

ROBOTICS

• Almost every year, there is an internal competition in which students compete to create the best moving robot. The robot must follow a line drawn on the roof, and students use the Lego Mindstorm robot kit and the C programming language to realize their projects. The robot has to precisely follow the line as quickly as possible to win the competition.
• The winning robots :-)
• The losing robots :-(

CASTELLI ROBOTICS TEAM (THE GYROSCOPES)

• We are a group of students with a passion for robotics who meet a couple of times a week after school to work on special projects.
• In September and October we held tryouts to get on the team: we split into groups and challenged each other on building simple robots and simulating matches between them. Here is some of the stuff that we have done:
  • A robot that moves at a fixed distance from the wall. Watch us fail here!
  • A crane-like robot that recognizes red boxes, lifts them, and then piles them on each other.
• Some of us are working on an EV3 controlled printer, which is a special project that we will show during the school's Open Day, in which we introduce IIS B. Castelli to middle school students. Have a look at it here and here!
• We are currently taking part in the FTC Res-Q Challenge, an international robotics competition between high school students. We will fly to the Netherlands in April to compete against lots of other European teams. You can see what our robot is supposed to do here!
• ...and follow us on Twitter! @TheGyroscopes

INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIAD IN INFORMATICS (IOI)

• Our school takes part in the OII (Olimpiadi Italiane di Informatica), a competitve programming contest whose aim is to choose the six students who will represent Italy at the annual IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics).
• We start off by competing in a school-sponsored problem solving contest, which identifies the students who will then take their first steps into competitive programming and will hopefully climb their way to the IOI by winning multiple competitions.
• We also hold a competion called "Algoritmi in festa" to gather students from other schools in our province to compete by solving challenging algorithmic problems. Other than being a competition, this event is an occasion to meet other people and to have fun.

DIGITAL KNOWLEDGES FOR DIGITAL COMPETENCES

• Digitial Video Broadcasting - DVB Block Diagram (How does the digital television work?) -->  You can watch the DVB lesson held by ScreenService Broadcasting Technologies in our telecommunications lab.
• ADSL & VDSL
• Networking:
  • Progetto Lazzaro: A school project in which Informatics and Telecommunications students build an LAN network for a primary school, and give lessons to children about the Linux operating system. (Watch the video and a local tv interview about the students involved in the project) 
  • Cisco Packet Tracer - A tutorial about PC networking (Watch the online tutorial)
• PCM (Pulse Coded Modulation) : Read a CLIL lesson about audio signal digitalization
• Quality in digital systems - --> 
• Electromagnetic Pollution - A school project about the monitoring of the electromagnetic pollution caused by school's Wi-Fi Access Points. Look at the posters that the students made about the monitoring:
  1. Introduction
  2. Wi-Fi Standard
  3. High Frequency Legislation
  4. Instruments and Softwares
  5. Results

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OUR EBOOKS

• Our ebooks are created in EPUB3  format using EPUB EDITOR. The ebooks can also be exported as SCORM objects which are therefore importable into any SCORM-compliant e-learning platform (such as Moodle). To read our ebooks, we recommend:
  • Readium ( http://readium.org/) with browser Chrome on computers (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux);
  • ibooks app on Apple tablets and Iphone based on IOS;
  • Gitden app on Android tablets and smart phones. 

• The ebooks can also be reached through their public URL. Here you can find some examples of our ebooks:
  • The Brescia Waste-to-energy plant: an example of interdisciplinary project for CLIL teaching 

  • Esperienza laboratorio LDR - A/D conversion

  • Guida all'uso di Arduino

INNOVATION IN TEACHING

• Edmodo (you can read more about our activities on Edmodo --> )
• Khan Academy (you can discover more about Khan Academy in our gallery here, here, here, here, here and here and read more about our activities on Khan Academy )
• CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)  and ICT (read more about connection between CLIL and IT ). This is a useful link for ICT tools for CLIL) . Learn about CLIL by watching the videos of DAVID MARSH, one of the fathers of CLIL)
• Codecademy (you can see more about it in our gallery here, here, here and here and read more about it on Codeacademy.org)
• European Schoolnet Academy
• Flipped classroom by means of IT 

CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT ICT IN TEACHING

• TET technology-enhanced teaching (watch the video of  the European Schoolnet Academy and read the transcript , which you can find in the material/file section).