Robotics

Last week we participated in Robocup. We have been working on our robots for several weeks. There were three teams chosen from year 5&6. Our team chose to do rescue, where you follow a line and the goal is to find a can and push it out of a green area. It sounds easier than it is. Other teams did soccer. It's basically a robot soccer. 

We used Ev3 to build everything. At the competition we had lots of malfunctions but it was still a learning experience. Our favourite thing was that there were so much cool stuff we could make our robot do.



Blogpost by Cindy and Rory

Year 6 Cantamaths Competition

A Year 6 Cantamaths Competition was hosted by Susan Rogers and her Year 8 class at Heaton last week. St Albans school had spent a couple of weeks preparing for this event. The questions were similar to Otago Maths problem solving questions. We entered three teams of four students.

St Albans 1: Rico, Thomas, Jacob and Mani

St Albans 2: James H, Ron, Neo and Samuel

St Albans 3: Emily, Phoebe, Max and Lucy H

Congratulations to James, Ron, Neo and Samuel who won the whole competition. This bodes well for 2017 as this team are all Year 5 students.

Fabulous Fudge Fantasia

Today we enjoyed tasting delicious fudge. The purpose of the day was to learn to establish and apply criteria in order to judge something. Next week we will be applying this learning when selecting the best solution to develop into an action plan for our Global Problem Solving Booklet. Today Noah's fudge was selected as the winner!

Thanks to all the children for their enthusiasm although it is easy to get excited about fudge!

Here are some of the recipes.

Lucy used the Edmond's recipe

 Noah's winning fudge!

 George's unique fudge

 Emily's Russian fudge

Creative Writing With Heather

Some talented writers from Year 6 are working with Heather today. They are working on creative writing via googledocs and Heather will given them feedback over the next few weeks as they continue on with their work both in class and at home.

 Hard at work. Children will have tired brains today!

Heather also shared a simple but effective quote about poetry.

First FPS Session Today

Today we had our first FPS session and the group worked very well. The treatment and rights of animals is certainly an interesting topic and the group enjoyed the start of their research.

Remember to follow the links on the FPS Research if you have time.

If you find other sites that others would find interesting you can email me, claire.howison@stalbans.school.nz and I will add them.

Here is our work on linking our thinking to some of the FPS Categories.

Back to the Mindlab for Robotics

On Wednesday we have another session at the Mindlab and this time we were led by Josh. It was another fabulous session. When we walked into the room there were kits for every person sitting on the desks. Creating the robots was a lesson in following instructions and they took about 40 mins to build. It helped if you liked playing with lego although the pieces were more pliable than lego.

After we had created our robots we plugged them into the computer and programmed in much the same way as we did last time. We added sensors that responded to light and dark and programmed using the senses as well.

Thanks Josh and Mindlab, it was another great session.

Robotics at the MindLab

Twelve excited students enter the Mind Lab for two hours of programming robots. Total engagement and challenge for 120 minutes. Thank you Mind Lab.

 Beginning our coding

 Responding to the challenge

 Testing our ideas

 Working as a team

The robots we used

FPS - Looking to the future

In preparation for our lockdown next week take time to read on some sites about the future.

Here are some interesting links to explore:

Planning for the FPS Lockdown

Today we talked about the timing needed to complete the FPS in the lockdown time limit of 2hours. See if you can remember this for the day, it will help.

FPS Research

Today we started our research into living in a surveillance society. We looked at many of the links on the FPS Research page and made out own notes as well as contributing to the notes on the board.



























There was an interesting article in the newspaper about Swannanoa School investigating the use of bracelets to award point to children who were behaving in the playground. You might like to read about it here.

Here is the response of the Minister of Education, Hekia Parata.