News and events
Robot Olympics at the Maker Festival
Harriet Bines, Maker{Futures} Programme Assistant
On the 7th July, Maker{Futures} and Arbourthorne Community Primary School held the ‘Robot Olympics’. A gadgety, electronic, maker festival to celebrate the culmination of their year becoming Sheffield’s first Maker school.
Cardboard workshop with Jayne
Being a Maker School is a growing movement internationally, and entails a maker-centred learning approach for primary education. Children learn by doing (through exploration, skill builders and tinker time) and at the same time develop the skills and knowledge to create, make and mend things. They also develop essential skills for the 21st century such as critical thinking and problem solving.
Amazingly, all classrooms at Arbourthorne now have their very own makerspace for children to tinker in. This sets a brilliant precedent for other schools because making can enhance all areas of the curriculum. Read more about our lead Maker School here: Arbourthorne - A Maker School.
To celebrate, we set up a carousel of tech-based challenges for the whole school. Arbouthourne’s artist in residence, Jayne, held a cardboard workshop for pupils to imagine and design ‘new school spaces’ - a theme that classes at Arbourthorne have been exploring over the past few weeks. Each class presented their ideas at the festival and TTS Resources donated coding and electronics prizes.
Can you complete the challenges in the robot olympics? Our first station was Micro:bit Robots which was about capturing the emotions of our mechanical friends. Pupils programmed a micro:bit (a pocket sized computer) to show different emotions on the LED display output. Sad, happy, shocked, confused…the robots had it all going on. Children learned how to use loops to make instructions run forever.
Our second challenge was an interactive play doh maze: a collaboration of Makey Makey, Scratch and squishy circuits. Children worked together to lead a magnet through their maze - but touch the sides and you heard a funny noise through Scratch.
Pupils also made binary code bracelets, where they used code to represent their initials using two colour beads. Binary code is how information is stored inside computers using 0’s and 1’s (bi means two). It is integral to the world of computing. We had some nifty codebreakers at Arbourthorne. You can have a go at this activity using the worksheet below.
The next challenge was about testing robotic strength. Can you build something using Strawbees and then test it's strength using a robotic arm? Grab, release, lift and lower… Children learned about the 6 degrees of freedom in the human body and how these motions are mimicked in the robotic arm to achieve the elbow and wrist motion.
Finally, pupils played with Sphero, our robot ball equipped with a gyroscope and accelerometer in a game of crazy golf. There weren’t many holes in one but the children were certainly good at dodging obstacles. Our other robots Cubetto, Dash, and the ozobots also made an appearance in a shady spot of the playground.
The Maker Festival was a cyber celebration of all that Arbourthorne has achieved on their journey to becoming a Maker school. Arbourthourne, working in partnership with The University of Sheffield will soon go on to help other schools become Maker Schools.
Can you write a secret message in binary code?
