Sharing our Shine

A group of dedicated Sunnyhills TeXperts shared their expertise with learners from Our Lady Star of the Sea today.  Over the last few weeks, they have been working hard to create workshops and then practice them to make sure they're going to work.  Our learners were helping Our Lady Star of the Sea get some experience with the robots we have so they can make decisions about what robots they're going to to get in their school.  

Our Sunnyhills team did an amazing job on the day, they definitely had their Sunnyhills Shine on.

Here are some of our learners in action... 

Inputs and Outputs

We've had a great time with Year 2 Learners in the Exploration Station over the last few weeks.  They've enjoyed learning about what an algorithm is and creating their own algorithms, as well as debugging their algorithms once they'd tested them. 

Our Year 2 learners worked together in groups to talk about what they thought a digital device was.  They came up with a few criteria but weren't one hundred percent sure so we're going to keep looking into what makes something digital.   

We also talked through what we thought the inputs and outputs for each device were.  We shared other devices we had at home or had seen before and what their inputs and outputs were too.  Other inputs we noticed were keys, trackpads, light or lack of light (a sensor) and microphones.

We then got to design our own creation that had an input and an output.  Some of us created things we'd seen before others decided to create completely new devices.  

Year 1 Algorithms

Some of our youngest learners have been back in the station this week and enjoyed figuring out how to write their own algorithms.  We used resources from Barefoot Computing to learn about algorithms.

An algorithm is a process or set of rules or instructions to be followed.  We can create algorithms for computers using code.

Learners thought about a character that they could teach someone else how to draw.  The all tried drawing Mrs Lee's Mr Monkey character by following her algorithm.  Then they worked with a buddy to and told their buddy their algorithm to create a character they had thought of.  Their buddy had to follow their algorithm to draw the character.

Here are our Mr Monkey drawings

We talked about how a set of instructions we give a computer is called an algorithm.  We need to be really specific with our instructions because computers only do what we've told them to do. Sometimes we need to debug those instructions if the computer doesn't do what we intended.

Each learner got their computer (a classmate) to follow their algorithm to create their character. Learners then debugged (changed, added, took away) their instructions and asked a different buddy to give them a go.

Here are the instructions we created and a few photos of us working the process of creating them and testing them:

We're Computer Scientists!

To start the term off the Exploration Station hosted two of our year 4 classes.

We reviewed what the station was about and our Safe and Sting SHINE Online learning from last term.   It was great to hear all about how our learners are staying safe online.  Most of our learners are well aware of the importance of letting their Mum, Dad and caregivers know what they're doing online, creating strong passwords and using resources that are just right for them.

Students were very keen to get creating in our space so we learnt a bit more about SHINE Online by looking at Helpful and smart before we planned how we could show others about being Helpful and Smart using Makey Makey's and scratch.

To help us with our Scratch coding we listened to the story If I were a Wizard by Paul Hamilton.  In this story, Hazel introduced us to some coding/computer science concepts like repeats and loops as well as sequence and order.    We talked about how computers only do what we tell them to - or what we've programmed them to do and that if we want the computer to give the right output we have to think carefully about the steps we tell it to go through. We then put this learning into practice while we created a variety of different things to teach others about being Helpful and Smart online.

We did a lot of debugging once we connected our Makey Makey's to our creations as some of our code didn't work.  We had to think carefully about our sequence and what we were asking our computer to do once it received inputs from our Makey Makey.

We didn't quite get all our creations finished so we took them back to our classrooms to do a bit more testing, making and sharing.