Coding Matariki Stars with mBots

This week we have been celebrating Matariki and we have had lots of activities and competitions. Many of these activities involved the theme of stars so  decided to continue this theme with my Year 8 class this morning. We have been coding our mBots to move, make noises, make lights come on, react to sensors. Today, we were coding our mBots to move in a star pattern.
First of all, we drew stars on paper without taking our pencils off the page.
Then we looked at what we would need in mBlock to code the star. They already know the repeat block.
These were the blocks they needed to use. The tricky part was setting the variables to the correct values so the mBot will turn the correct amount on the points of the stars.

The students showed fabulous resilience today and went about the task of trial and error really happily.

We went out into the carpark about half way through. We drew big stars on the ground and walked the path so they could feel the actions that the mBot needed to take.

When they were testing the movement of the mBots in the class, we decided to tape a board marker pen to the front so it could draw on the table top. The students could then see the motion clearer and see what changes needed to be made.

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The students have been writing this up on their blogs and explain it much better than me.

Florence
Giovani
Karlos
Sakshi
Ellenora
Akuhata

Matariki Presentation

Today the staff had their morning briefing in the Marae to celebrate the start of Matariki.
My NCEA Level 3 students have been using Matariki as the theme for their design project.
We put together a short presentation to show the staff this morning.
The students looked at just one element of their design work and how it related to the Matariki story.
They planned what they were going to say and practiced it before hand.

Here is their presentation - it shows their design work, the influence from Matariki and the verbal presentation that they did.



Here is a video of their presentations (with a bit of me doing the introduction)