Heretaunga Ararau and robotics

This term our junior children have been really busy exploring the robots. Everybody that starts school and joins the group is enthusiastic and keen to play. By letting the children explore and share the robots they have learned many of the basics and show confidence at making them go.
My job as the teacher is to move them on to being more deliberate and accurate.
Recently we worked with grids that the robots move on. The children's job was to programme a path so the robot would get to a specific destination.

Ultimately, this will lead to work with coordinates in future years.
At the moment, we are just trying to get our car robots to different parts of the fairground!

Working on Resilience and Perseverance with LEGO

Lately, the senior classes have been investigating our Lego EV3 robotics. They have had to draw on their knowledge of scratch programming (scratch.mit.edu) to understand how to programme the robots.
After a brief chance to explore the software and take control of the robots, the children were asked to work on a specific challenge of making the robot follow a line.

This requires them to:

• Test and alter their programmes.
• Think about and use decimals and measurements.
• Share with team members and solve problems.
• deal with mistakes and work on their growth mindset.

Of course, they also had a great deal of fun while trying to be successful!