Grades 2 – 5 Digital Discovery Course

A very popular TCPS After School Course, the Digital Discovery class program helps students learn to design and create fun projects. Some of this year’s exciting projects introduced students to animation, game design, app design and coding. Students gained a better familiarity with many different tools and concepts and applied them independently.

Students used many of the different programs in the Adobe Creative Cloud, giving them access to the world’s best creative apps and services. The Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ programs and services for photography, design, video, web and more. This introduction came with many hands-on lessons that gave students the ability to create anything they could imagine. The primary focus was on the powerhouse design tools such as Photoshop, Animate  and After Effects. These programs allowed students to explore their creativity.

One of the first Adobe programs utilized this year was Photoshop, the industry standard for creative visual expression. Students discovered how to open and navigate documents, customize the Photoshop interface and edit photos. They also learned how to crop and transform images, make detailed selections, work with layers and masks, retouch photos and use Smart Objects and adjustment layers to apply non-destructive modifications to their images. In addition, they learned many additional parts of Photoshop such as working with type and layer effects.

The students were also introduced to 3D game development. Hands-on lessons were used to teach the students the basic programming principles of game design.  They discovered how to build their world’s terrain, populate it with characters and props, m their behaviors and, finally, introduce game rules. This was done in visual programming language that created a development environment that allows for maximum creativity and design.

The students truly enjoyed this After School Course and we anticipate high enrolment in the program again in the fall!