Holy Trinity Primary, Wantirna South

As we are reaching the end of the school year so too are we reaching the end of our school Lego Engineers program for 2019. The students from years 3 to 6 have participated in this program to develop their skills and thinking based around the areas of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The students have a built a variety of different models from catapults to self flipping cars and moonwalking robots. Their skills and knowledge has developed massively in the two years I have been teaching this program and I thank all the students for their enthusiasm during Lego sessions throughout the year.

Over the last few weeks all classes from Years 3 to 6 have participated in a final Lego presentation session where they got to rebuild one of the Lego models taught throughout this year. In addition, each group created a presentation using the Explain Everything app where they showed how their model worked including explaining the forces used to help make the model function efficiently. The students from the prep to year 3 classes were lucky enough to view these presentations and they gave the groups a mark based on the following rubric.

Overall, the presentations were very positive and demonstrated how much the students had learned. Here are a few pictures of these presentations …….

Every Friday students from Years 2 and 3 participate in HT’s Minecraft Club run by the DigiTech Leaders. We have been learning about the basics with using their Educational Minecraft accounts such as collecting resources, building and mining. Today all the students joined in the same world created by the DigiTech leaders and they searched for different resources. Everyone is having fun playing minecraft and we will continue playing it next term. We encourage the students to develop their skills further during the holidays when they use their accounts at home.

Here are a few photos of today’s session …….

Over the last few weeks the students in Digitech have been learning to code using our Ozobots. An Ozobot in a small robot the responds to different colours – mainly red, green, blue and black. When you draw these codes together in different sequences it can make the Ozobot move in different ways. Some of our favourite moves so far have been the Nitro boost (fast speed), tornado (spin around) and backwalk (go backwards) and pause 3 seconds.

Our latest task requires the students to make the Ozobot do a series of moves including right and left turns, change speeds and do a ‘cool’ move such as the backwalk. Another task required the students to complete a bowling challenge where the Ozobot needed to knock over some bowling pins. These challenges  certainly got our brains going.

Here are the students in action during our Ozobot sessions ….

In lego lessons this term the students in years 4, 5 and 6 have been learning how to build lots of different models such as  a moonwalking robot, a battle tank and a remote control car that can be coded with your Chromebook.

In these lessons we practise working together with in a group, following instructions carefully on a sheet and learning about some of the different forces used to make these models work.

Overall, Lego lessons are really fun and they teach you lots about some of the different machines we use in our lives.

Here are some of our students in action …..