By Mrs Burtenshaw (Computer Science Teacher)

This week, 3T and their teacher became robots! 

They began by thinking about all the times that we follow instructions both at home or in school to complete a task. Many shared that they made Lego models, baked cakes, and learnt dance moves. Then we met some robots - the very friendly Asimo made by Honda and Atlas, Spotmini, and Handle from Boston Dynamics, who were rather impressive dancers.

After chatting about the sorts of robots we had met and whether Siri, Alexa, or Google home assistants were a type of robot, we explored some new vocabulary. Algorithm - to mean a series of steps to achieve something (just like a recipe); bug - a mistake in the steps, debug - to correct the mistake in the steps, and finally program - an algorithm written in a way a computer (or robot) can understand.

It was time for 3T to program a real robot namely Mrs Burtenshaw-Bot. Using arrows, 3T wrote programs for their teacher robot to complete to arrange cups in a pattern. There were quite a few bugs, lots of debugging, but eventually, Year 3 was successful in programming Burtenshaw-Bot to stack the cups exactly as they wanted. Phew!

Now they knew how to program their robots, Year 3 took it in turns to be the robot and the programmer to program each other.

 Kaelyn reflected that it had been “tricky to get the programs right the first time” and that it was “best to test them yourself before you gave them to the robot.”

Next, Year 3 will put their algorithm knowledge to use to code some Angry Birds, mazes, and much more.