Digital Technology
Jells Park Primary School
Term 2 has had a very hectic start with a temporary swimming timetable in place, Senior House Athletics and the Year 5 camp as well as Easter and ANZAC Day.
The DigiTech lab has been alive with excited younger students as they discover robotics and the older students as they explore a variety of amazing programs that require collaboration and problem solving.
The Foundation students are exploring our cutest robots – the BeeBots. They are developing their basic coding skills in order to program their robot to move in a given direction or to follow a set pathway. Later in the term the Foundation students will create mazes and pathways that require a simple written code to be followed.
Continuing on with the Robotics theme the Year 1 students have been introduced to our smallest robots – Ozobot Evo. These tiny robots can be programmed by drawing a sequence of different coloured lines. Later in the term the Year 1 students will create pathways for their Ozobots to follow that will include a variety of special effects such as disco lights, zigzag walk, spins and speed changes.
Year 2 have started exploring Scratch Junior which will familiarise them with the more formal interface of Scratch. Scratch and Scratch Junior are block based coding programs where the students will create a fun game and learn to save their own creations.
The Year 3 and 4 students are using their problem solving skills to provide creative solutions to the Engineering Challenges in Kodable’s Precision Collision courses. They are required to create a course for a marble to roll through within a certain time and use basic physics to solve the problems.
Year 5 are creating a project this term. Working with a partner the students are using a variety of tools in Google Earth to locate 12 worldwide places/structures and present these in their choice of presentation software such as Canva, PowerPoint or Google Slides.
Finally the Year 6 students have all been registered for the Victorian Coding Challenge which is a free, online challenge program offered by the Maths Association of Victoria. Students will be given a series of challenges that they can work on during their DigiTech sessions and involves using Scratch to develop solutions to the offered challenges.
Heather Cook
Digital Technologies