Upper School were invited to go and spend the day at PNE stadium today and take part in a special STEM project where they got to learn to use all the latest school coding gadgets and compete against other schools.
We began the morning using the OZOBOTS and the class were set a challenge to programme the robots to move around a series of routes. The more coloured dots they made it to, the more points they were given. The class worked independently and with perseverance to get as many points as possible with Judah and Alex and Nathaniel and Maddi doing very well!
Next we went to the LEGO room and built a LEGO bug which the groups then moved around with a remote controller. The challenge came when they had a short amount of time to add more LEGO to the bug to improve its speed so that it might win in a race against the other bugs. The race, in the end, turned out to be more of a crawl for everybody’s bugs and there seemed to be a lot of bits of LEGO strewn arcoss the floor where parts had fallen off!
The third activity before a very yummy lunch was to code a SPHERO BOLT+ to travel around a map and stop at a range of places along the way. The children had to code the angle, speed and time needs for each new move of the sphere. It was really tricky! Ben and Reuben got ten points on this activity as they managed to code the bot to go to the stadium on the map.
In the afternoon, the children had more freedom to choose which activities they wanted to have another go at and there was also some LEGO to use and make into a football bot. The children loved using their own body movements on the camera of the iPads to tell the LEGO bots where to go on the pitch to score a goal.
The class had a good day and although we didn’t win the competition, we learnt lots about coding and working well in a team. Thanks to the PNE staff for inviting us to take part!
PNE STEM Day
