On 23 November we were fortunate to have representatives from the organisation ‘2.times do’ in College to work with 30 of our Year 9 students. These workshops have been funded through the East Devon Science project which has been designed to promote STEM subjects and encourage students to start considering career options.
Maddy Knight (9JCO) has written an account which demonstrates the value of having specialist equipment in school which otherwise the students would not be able to access.
The day started by building a chassis with our chosen partners, which would eventually become our robots. After we had finished building we connected raspberry pis to the computers to program our robots. To get our heads around the advanced electrical software we did a few programming starters. This was fun because we could make our robot do lots of things like make it go round in circles, go backwards, change the speed, or anything else you wanted to do.
For the last hour we attached an ultrasonic sensor to our robot, so it could sense if it was going to hit something, we then programmed the robot to, if it sensed a chosen distance, go backwards and turn around. I really enjoyed the day, it was a really unique and enjoyable experience and can’t wait for more days like this!
The students had a really valuable experience and hopefully will be inspired to consider computing in the future.