Brooke Weston Event

Students at Brooke Weston School, Corby have been working with the University of Northampton's School of Science and Technology on the junkbots project. Scott Turner and Terry Tudor on the 16th and 17th February 2010 went to the school to run the sessions. Starting with a talk and activities on waste management, including how much waste the UK produced, and in terms of numbers of slices of toast what is the cost of energy of leaving a monitor on overnight.  


The task was to produce robots out of rubbish that could carry other rubbish into a containment area. The change made to the sessions was that students brought there own 'junk' to the sessions.

Some innovative and creative designs were produced involving 'legs', wheels (including turning cans into wheels and wheels from old toys). 

 

Some of the designs pushed rubbish into the area, but one of the designs carried the rubbish into the area and some designs used magnets to pick up small steel parts (nuts and bolts).

 The third task was to use lego-based robots to repeat the second task by programming the robots and use of sensors.

Based on the feedback from Nigel Barratt (see the quote below) who co-ordinated the session at the school, students were encouraged to keep journals of their activities and team leaders were selected by the groups.
"I do feel embedding some sort of diary/journal adds a focus and allows every one to reflect on what they have done."


Based on the feedback shown above the session were enjoyed and the level of engagement was overall high.