Highnam Church Of England Primary Academy

Pupils in Year 5 enjoyed a great STEM challenge on Wednesday this week. They teamed up with Mo from STEM Works to have a challenging day of teamwork, construction, computing and excitement. Pupils had a super time and were still talking about the day at the end of the week. The day began with the children thinking about what a robot is and how they are made. They were shown a PowerPoint containing different objects and were asked to decided if each object was a robot or not. Some of the objects included a dishwasher, a Mars Exploration Rover and a hoover. The children then thought about the different components that would make up a robot, before constructing their own. Lego was the main resource used in their own robots that they built in groups of 3. The Mindstorms EV3 block made the robot come to life and this component allowed them to programme the robot, through using software on the computer. Different challenges were set in order to allow them to develop their computing and programming skills. The challenges were initially easy, moving the robot in a straight line, but they soon became more difficult! Some of the challenges were: Strictly Come Robot, where the children had to make their robot dance whilst staying in the lines on a grid; a football challenge, where they had to move 3, 3D cubes into a goal and they also had to park their robot in a specific square. Each team was awarded points for their level of computing accuracy and there was eventually a winning team! Thank you to Miss Gent for facilitating this wonderful experience.