Our Koala
Meet Carter!
Our koala, Carter, is unique because he shows how technology and nature can exist together.
We decorated Carter with Australia's native flora and fauna like we saw at Back Creek Travelling Stock Reserve. We also included pictures of and iPad and a phone because that's how people can use Nature Mapr. The iPad has a picture of the Nature Mapr logo on it.
We chose to make Carter talk because who wouldn't love a talking koala?! We used Scratch and MaKey MaKey to make this happen.
We named him Carter, because it sounds a bit like 'cartography', which is the study of maps, and our project was all about mapping nature!
We love our koala, Carter! When we saw him, we were so excited - and then we learned that we get to keep him! How lucky are we?!
We each brainstormed some ideas for painting Carter, and then we looked at what everyone had suggested. Most of us had included lots of nature - especially gum trees - and a phone or iPad. This is because of our experience with Nature Mapr where we used the iPads to take photos of nature! We worked in groups to plan drawings for different parts of our koala, then made sketches on his body before we began to paint him.
Our iPad has a picture of the Nature Mapr logo on it, to show the app that we used
A gum tree takes up most of Carter's back. Snow gums were by far the most common species at Back Creek
There were lots of ground covers and shrubs at Back Creek, so we included those as well
The camera on Carter's head represents the photos we took at Back Creek
This kookaburra represents the bird life we saw and heard at Back Creek
Thankfully, we didn't see any snakes on our expedition, but we kept our eyes peeled!
We believe that Carter is the world's first talking koala!
We used Scratch to record our voices and write a computer program, and a MaKey MaKey to act as the controller. Anyone who sees Carter can use our control panel to learn more about our project by hearing us - we mean Carter - speak!
See how he works by watching our video.