war on the dance floor
Jessica Sartori
Head of Learning Science
In November, a group of students from Years 7 to 9 who indicated they have interest in computer coding competed in a Robot Dance competition.
Students had been working on their code at lunchtimes in the lead up to the event and had some time on the day to finalise their code. I was very impressed with how the students worked in groups to learn a new code and how they choreographed the moves to music. In the afternoon we had two Associate Professors from RMIT, John and Sebastian, come and speak to the students about the current research in the area and how important coding is to learn as a scientific language.
I particularly like to thank Jakob Schuster, Eric Seychell, Zac Joan and Luca Couchman-Diggens for doing a wonderful job in coaching their teams and teaching their peers the code. It was a wonderful opportunity to draw on their experience from earlier in the year, as well as a chance for the older students to exercise their skills at mentoring the junior students.
It was a great day and we look forward to repeating the event in 2017.
Zarif Zarif, Jay Marino & Hirday Bajaj
Year 7
We programmed the dance moves on the computer, then we got an actual robot called Rey to test our code on. After this, we presented our Robot dance to all the other students. We also heard a lecture from people from RMIT - all about programming and Artificial Intelligence robots. The best part of the day was seeing what we had programmed on our computer being done by Rey. We would definitely like to do this again.
Zenry Matsuoka, Rowan Amos & Christian Liggieri
Year 7
We all found the experience fun and challenging and enjoyed developing a dance sequence. We have learned a lot of interesting facts about coding robots and looking at stability and timing. We also had a visit from Dr John who is a professor of Robotics and Coding at RMIT. He and his colleague, Dr Sebastian, taught us about A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) and how robots and coding affects us now and how it will affect us in the future.
Oliver Darwin, Nicholas Duncan, Atticus Frost & Liam Trumble
Year 7
We spent time learning and using the Choregraphe Suite to create a short dance, using a random song. The robot, Nao, was brought in so we could test our code on the robot to debug. Afterwards, we voted for which robot danced the best then we listened to John talk about the possible careers in Robotics and how important coding is as a language.
The most difficult part of the task was animating the legs in a way that Nao could keep its balance.
Lily Dodd & Charlotte Sherlock
Year 7
We spent a few lunchtimes learning how to program the robot to dance, using Choreographe Suite and then we spent a day finishing our designs. We found it very interesting and challenging at times, trying to program the robot to do what we wanted it to do. The talk by Dr John was very inspiring, and we learned a lot about artificial intelligence and where this science will take us in the future.
