Robots encourage children's interest in computing science
It was just as Liam had warned. Instead of following him around, the small Lego-like model shied away from him in hesitant little jumps. “Something went wrong,” he said, looking bemused. “It’s going the wrong way. It was supposed to follow us.”
The rest of his P6 class from Bruntsfield Primary in Edinburgh didn’t mind. Laughing, they crowded round the diminutive robot keen to make it do what it was told. After a few more minutes, it was whisked away safely by Morna Findlay, schools liaison officer at the informatics department of Edinburgh University, and the rest of the pupils were called on to demonstrate what their robots could do.
One walked in an exact square, another knocked over walls of juice cartons, quite a few spun on the spot and called out funny messages. Each had been programmed by the children in groups of four, helped by a researcher from the university, during an afternoon workshop showing them the wonders of computers. The workshop had cost the school nothing and even included a snack.
“It’s been wonderful,” says Kate Hanson, P6 teacher and Bruntsfield’s maths and science co-ordinator. “It fits right in with Curriculum for Excellence, because of the team skills and co-ordinated development. It is integrating all aspects of their learning in such an imaginative way. And to follow it up with drawing is spot on.”
She jumped at the chance to give pupils an insider’s look at what is happening in informatics, which covers computer science, cognitive science, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. Last year, she took them to a neuroscience workshop, which she described as fabulous. “The children got to hold real human brains, with gloves on. It was an incredible learning experience,” she enthuses. “Next term, our technology topic is to design and program a device to remove toxic waste spillage. To actually program real robots has been great preparation for them. You can see how engaged they were.”
Full article at TES Connect