STEM

Thank you for everyone's support to make Monday night's STEM Festival Opening Ceremony and Amazing Race a huge success. The rain stayed away this year as families moved around the school to complete as many of the 8 STEM challenges as they could. In addition to Monday night, students have been participating in a number of STEM activities in their classroom over the last week. To see some photo highlights from the week, please take a look at the Teaching, Learning and Wellbeing section of the newsletter.

Prep - This term, students will be focusing on physical sciences and learning about how different things move. In lesson seven, students focused on the movements of slide and spin. They completed a sorting activity where they needed to identify objects that slide and objects that spin.

Grades 1 - This term, students will be focusing on digital technologies and learning to program the Tale-Bot Pro robot. In lesson seven, students were introduced to the loop / repeat button. They used this button to have the robot create repeated patterns.

Grades 2 - This term, students will be focusing on digital technologies and learning to program the Tale-Bot Pro robot. In lesson seven, students used the loop / repeat button to complete various challenges. They were asked to create different shapes and patterns using the smallest number of commands - this required them to identify the repeating pattern and use the loop / repeat button.

Grades 3 - This term, students will be focusing on digital technologies and learning to program the VinciBot robot. In lesson seven, students learned how to program the VinciBot using different control blocks. They focused on using a 'wait' block to have the robot pause before completing the next command in the program, a 'repeat' block to have the robot repeat part of the code, and a 'forever' block to have the robot repeat part of the code on a continuous loop. 

Grades 4 - This term, students will be focusing on digital technologies and learning to program the VinciBot robot. In lesson seven, students used the VinciBot to draw different shapes. They used a combination of length, angle and repeat to create triangles, pentagons, 5-point stars and 8-point stars.

Grades 5 - This term, students will be focusing on digital technologies and learning to program a micro:bit. In lesson seven, students continued working on their crystal ball challenge (coding the micro:bit to give a random response to a question). They also had the opportunity to code games on their micro:bit, including 'Snap the Dot' and '7 Seconds'. 

Grades 6 - This term, students will be focusing on digital technologies and learning to program a micro:bit. In lesson seven, students continued working on their Build a Robot challenge. This week's goal was to combine their cardboard robot with their micro:bit devices and have the robot 'work'. Photos and videos will be posted to Seesaw as a portfolio activity.

Sandy Brewerton

STEM Teacher