Years 5 and 6 have been having some very exciting sessions of ‘STEM games’ and ‘Robotics’ in the last couple of weeks.
Year 5 children had to work together in teams to find solutions to the tasks set, in the fields of Science, Maths, Technology and Engineering and Year 6 had to program some VEX robots (using a version of ‘Scratch’, a program with which they are familiar) to make them move round a course without knocking over blocks and some even managed to make their robots ‘dance’!
A lot of noise ensued(!), but some great thinking was done too and they all had to draw on all their skills of resilience, perseverance and encouraging others to tackle the tasks. Thank you to Jenny and Seb who came to run all the sessions, under the auspices of Norfolk County Council’s ‘Educator Solutions’. There were some particularly well-engineered cranes and interesting labelling of organs within the body!
Comments often heard from the children during the sessions ‘Wow!’, ‘Coo!’, ‘Yes!’
Comments from the children after the sessions:
Poppy – “It helped you learn about how robots are controlled, what they can do and the instructions you have to give them.”
Milly – “I liked the challenges we had to do and I think this is a very good experience for me and others.”
Julia – “The Robotics session was a great learning experience for me as I got to learn about robots. It was great fun to program robots and make them do a variety of things. It has inspired me to do more programming and I really enjoyed the session.”
“I really enjoyed the Robotics because it was ICT in something else – to do with robots instead of just coding on a computer.”
“I really liked Robotics because it was something I’ve never done before and I liked programming it.”
Olivia “I really enjoyed the Robotics and at the end, if we’d done everything, we could create a dance with them.”
Anni – “I enjoyed the fact that we tried a lot to move it through and make sure it doesn’t hit and it was really fun.”
Kuba – “I really liked the Robotics because they give us a better understanding of programming in the future if we get a job.”
Oli – “I really enjoyed the programming and the challenges.”