Half of the children were able to work with Edison robots creating code to solve a problem. They then needed to debug their code to have the robot achieve their goal.
Edison video here
Eva: Edison was fun to control, until he got stuck on out tape. We had to keep going back and fixing the speed and the distance.
Alick: It was fun, you had to do a lot of things to make it go but it was rewarding when we got it to work.
Zoe B: Changing the speed and distance helped to make the robot do as we wanted.
Maddox: It was hard to get the robot to go backwards and forward.I had to use a metal ruler to work out my distances.
The other half of the year 5’s were able to learn all about how circuits work, learning about open and closed circuits. We learnt that electrons will flow the shortest route from the battery/power back to the battery. This means that if there is another part of the circuit touching before the desired action then the electrons will jump back to the beginning without turning on the light.
Electronics class Liam and Quade
Digital circus teacher
Electronics 101 Toby and Oscar
Laila: it was an amazing experience to experiment with technical difficulties.
Anna: I was fascinated how the circuit worked with battery, led and copper tape.
Hana:I learnt that copper tape, and playdough could conduct electricity.
Emma: It was fun, but hard to find the blue light and get it going.
We were able to create our own circuit using copper tape, a battery, and an LED onto paper.
Electronics making our circuit Bailey
Electronics completed Arameara
The skills the students learnt in these sessions were taken to teach the other group, within the robotic session they learnt skills such as creating algorithms, programming, debugging, and communicating with others. In the electronics sessions they learnt skills such as the requirements of power, how to make circuits, conductivity, power sources and the way electrons work.
Electronics class Adam and Mithesh
Digital circus robotics Evie
Digital circus robotics Daniel
Being able to have this experience was rewarding for Aratiatia’s year 5’s at building skills that they can use in a range of different challenges.
Keywords: Coding, Digital Technology, Edison, electronics
