Junkbots

For the last few months at lot of the outreach work from the Junkbots project was focused on the exercises based around turning cans into drawing bots or junk clearing bots. Yesterday (21st June 2012) the robot programming side of the project was trialled with primary schools. The Northamptonshire based Nene Lakes Extended Services ran "Chemistry at Work Day" event hosted by Scott Bader, Wollaston  and the robot programming was also included as well. The programming idea, an off-shoot of the junkbots project, was for the students to programming an NXT Lego robot to dance using only four commands that allowed the robot to: go forward for so many centimetres go back for so many centimetres go turn right for so many degrees go turn left for so many degrees The structure of the activity was up to 5 minutes introduction to the activity up to 10 minutes as a group of usually up seven; design a dance routine of no more than four moves up to 10 minutes putting the ro...

The results of a funding from HE STEM South West has enabled the junkbot project to go into primary schools and the material to be revised based on good practice in STEM public engagement in primary schools .  The funding looked at adopted the ideas and practice developed previously to produce STEM activities in this case targeted at Primary schools. Details of the work developed and a case study can be found at:  http://www.hestem-sw.org.uk/project?id=16&pp=540 Details of the case study can be found at:  http://projects.hestem-sw.org.uk/upload/Junkbot_june_northampton.pdf Details of an in-school session plan can be found at:  http://projects.hestem-sw.org.uk/upload/Planning_Process_junkbots_KS3_4_longer.docx Details of an STEM club session plan can be found at:  http://projects.hestem-sw.org.uk/upload/Planning_Process_junkbots_primary_short8.docx Junkbots on Prezi If you would like to know more about th...