Creative Transform sits at the Creative row and the Transform column of the PICRAT grid. Students are making something that could not exist without the technology.
A lot of this cell is models and simulations. Year 9 groups build a Twine simulation of the July Crisis that tracks every decision. Year 8 code a Scratch pondweed model and test it against the class's own data. Year 4 program a Scratch fraction checker that draws any two fractions.
Some of it is work built from live or large data: a storm hydrograph for the River Severn from river gauge data, a data portrait of the names on a town's war memorial, a p5.js artwork driven by the local weather.
It is not the target for every lesson. These projects take time, and several run over a sequence of lessons. Creative Transform is worth planning for a few times a year, where the subject has something that only this kind of work can reach.
Art
Students write a p5.js sketch whose colours, movement and density are set by live weather readings, then leave it running on a screen for a week.
Students build a lantern from willow, card and tracing paper and code the micro:bit inside it so its light pattern changes when a passing visitor's shadow falls across it.
Students model a real spot in the school grounds to its measured size in CoSpaces Edu and design a kinetic sculpture for it, coding its parts to move and to change when a visitor clicks it.
Students take the Met Office monthly rainfall series for their region since 1836, write p5.js rules that turn every month into a mark, and print the generated design onto fabric.
Students code a p5.js piece that reads how much a spectator moves and how loudly they speak, so every visitor changes the work, with no images or sound stored.
Computing
Groups of four, two students from each of two schools, write one Python number-guessing game over a staff-hosted Teams call, passing the driver role between schools every ten minutes.
Drama
Students taking the sound design role write a Sonic Pi program that generates the underscore for their group's devised piece as it runs, and change it live in response to the actors in each run.
Design and technology
Pairs design a card night lantern for a Reception child, program a micro:bit in MakeCode to light up when the light level drops, and adjust the program after testing it in a dark cupboard.
English
Groups write two rival openings for a bulletin article urging pupils to use the new water refill stations, test them on around 200 pupils at a partner school in another town through an anonymous Microsoft Forms survey, and rewrite from the results and from that school's comments on their drafts.
Grade 7 pairs post explanations of Dickinson's 'Hope is the thing with feathers' in answer to questions a Grade 6 class at a partner school left on a staff-run Padlet, then rewrite them twice from Grade 6's replies.
Pairs build the Birlings' dining room in CoSpaces Edu and write two versions of each character's speech, coded so the visitor hears the guarded or the cornered version depending on which clues they have found.
Students count sentences carrying two semantic fields of their choice across the whole of A Christmas Carol in Google Sheets, chart the results stave by stave and build an argument from them.
Students write a Twine short story that stores the reader's choices in variables, so the narrator's account of later scenes changes depending on what the reader did earlier.
Over three lessons, groups build a corpus of 20 Gemini-written film review openings, code it against 20 published openings, and write up what the data shows about machine-written reviews.
Geography
Groups take temperature readings around the school vegetable beds for a week with micro:bits, then code an alarm that shows a snowflake, and keeps showing it, once the temperature falls below a level they chose from their readings.
Pairs program a Scratch model of the water cycle in which a sun slider sets how fast water evaporates, the cloud grows until it is full, and rain falls back to the rivers and sea.
Six groups code micro:bits to send sound levels by radio from different parts of the school, the class watches the readings arrive as a live graph, and they build a noise map from it.
Pairs type a fortnight of their own weather-station readings into Scratch lists and code an animated report whose rain, cloud, wind and presenter's advice are decided by the numbers, then run it on each new day's readings.
Students measure the cliff edge at Happisburgh on dated satellite images in Google Earth, pool their readings in a class sheet to calculate rates of retreat, and build a mapped judgement on the shoreline policy.
Students pull four weeks of 15-minute river level and rainfall readings from the Environment Agency into Google Sheets, build their own storm hydrograph and write a flood briefing for Bewdley.
Over a week, groups follow a named hurricane as it happens, updating a Google Site each lesson with its position, pressure and winds from Windy and the sea temperature beneath it from earth.nullschool, and forecasting its next move.
History
Pairs write a 150-word history of one household from their town's 1851 census on a staff-run Padlet, and rewrite it after family history society volunteers reply with records the class does not hold.
Groups build a playable Twine simulation of the July Crisis whose hidden variables carry every decision forward, then play each other's versions to test whether war could have been avoided.
Students trace every name on the town's war memorial in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database, pool the records in one sheet, chart what they show and publish a school-only memorial site.
Over five lessons, a class studying the American West and a partner class in California build a joint site comparing how Britain saw the Gold Rush in 1849 with how Californians remember it today, each side revising its pages to answer the other's questions.
Students rebuild one stage of the 1914 to 1918 chain of evacuation at full scale in CoSpaces Edu from sources, walk a stretcher carry through it, and use what they find to explain why evacuation was so slow.
Maths
Each child programs a Scratch project that asks for two fractions, draws them as equal-length bars one under the other, and lets a partner test whether any pair is equivalent.
Pairs build a Desmos rectangle whose sliders set its sides and whose rules report area and perimeter, write three challenges for Grade 3, watch them try it, and rebuild whatever tripped them up.
Starting from a p5.js starter sketch, students code the times-table circle, where point n joins point k × n mod N, and investigate which multipliers make which curves.
Students build a Desmos graph with sliders that lets a classmate discover the rules for y = f(x) + a and y = f(x + a) without being told them.
Students turn NOAA's full monthly carbon dioxide record from Mauna Loa into a Google Sheets dashboard, with a filter by decade, a trendline and a seasonal-cycle chart.
Languages (MFL)
Over five lessons, a Grade 8 Spanish class and a partner class in Seville learning English build a photo essay on the school day, rewriting each caption in response to the other class's replies.
Grade 11 and a partner Gymnasium class in Leipzig answer the same anonymous survey on digital life, and the UK students write a German analysis of the differences that the Leipzig class then challenges and corrects.
Students translate the opening of Camus's L'Étranger themselves, generate a set of Gemini translations under briefs they design, and write a commentary on which choices the machine makes every time and which shift.
Students work with the census population of all 183 municipalities in the province of Soria since 1900, sort and chart the losses, and write a data-led article in Spanish around what they find.
Music
Students compose a short piece in Sonic Pi from live loops, chance events and a melody built from a variable, then perform it by changing the code while it plays.
Students code a p5.js sound installation for the school foyer that listens to the room's noise level and the time of day, and changes its texture, harmony and density in response.
Students count note-to-note moves in Bach chorale melodies to build a simple statistical model, code it in Sonic Pi to generate new melodies, and critique what it captures and misses.
PE
Pairs program a micro:bit pacer that beats out a step rate and shows a model heart whose beat rises and recovers by rules they write, then test the model against their own pulses in a step test and rewrite its rules.
Science
Pairs code a Scratch model in which 24 particle clones jiggle in place, slide about or fly around the stage as a temperature slider passes 0°C and 100°C, then test each other's models for things real water never does.
Each student codes a Scratch model in which light and carbon dioxide sliders set the rate of oxygen bubbles, then rewrites its rule until it matches the class's own pondweed results.
Lessons that look Creative Transform but sit in another
Useful counter-examples when you are checking your own lesson placement on the PICRAT grid.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.