Year 5/6 News

RoboGals Incursion

By Deepita, Aletta and Terrence

On the 21st of November, 2023, the Year 5/6 students were invited to participate in learning about coding through a corporation known as RoboGals. RoboGals is an international organisation that hopes to “inspire, engage and empower'' young women to study engineering and its many fields. It is committed to transforming underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

At the beginning of the lesson, two students from Robogals, Nayeer and Shrika, showed us a slideshow about engineering and its fields - such as mechanical engineering, software engineering, etc. They then described each type of engineering and had us try to guess how the names of each field corresponded to what kind of engineering went into it. We learned a lot about engineering. 

Afterwards, we sorted into teams of 2 or 3, and we each received a laptop and a Mindstorm robot. We then programmed it to do something simple, like go forward, go background and turn. Then we made it do the movements we wanted on a loop. After that, we had a challenge - we had to make the robot go forward when it saw something black, but backward when it detected something white. After completing the challenge, each group battled their robots in a white masking tape-outlined octagonal arena. If your robot crossed the white line or got flipped over, you were out of the game. We had three rounds, and the last robot standing was the winner.

 

We learned a lot about engineering, and this was an amazing opportunity for everyone in Year 5/6 .

Beach Day

By Mustafa, Deepita and Rawan 

On Monday, 27th of November, the Year 5/6 students had a very exciting opportunity - a chance to learn about beach safety. When one goes to the  beach, knowing how to be safe and out of danger is incredibly important for all ages. We were grateful that we were lucky enough to learn about beach safety very early on, so we will be unharmed whenever we decide to visit the beach in the future. At the beginning of the lesson, our year was divided into three groups - one for each of our classes, and we split up to go to our first activities. 

The first activity was learning to take life jackets on and off. In this activity we also learnt what to do in the event of being aboard a sinking boat. In order to stay warm and safe in this situation, it is recommended to form a circle by joining arms, and have elderly, young, or pregnant people stand in the center. In the next activity, we learnt all about beach safety signs, such as shorebreaks in the water, or not leaving rubbish on the beach. 

Afterwards, we played a variety of fun games, like beach baseball. We also played charades where the lifeguards sorted us into 3 groups, gave one group a topic to act out about the beach, and the other groups had to guess what they were. The group that guessed correctly would earn a point, and they would keep competing until the end, and the team with the most points would win. 

Overall, the Beach safety day was great, and the entire Year 5/6 students had an amazing time learning how to stay safe on the beach.