The Tallest Class in Banton Primary
This week we have been converting our Steady Hand games to incorporate our micro:bits. The micro:bits record the number of touches and tell the player the games is over after 5 touches.
We will used these at our Christmas Fayre when we let people play for a small fee. A sweet for the ones that get through with no mistakes.
We have started a new STEM project. Building some Steady Hand games for our Christmas Fayre.
Yesterday me and my class were making steady hand games in the makerspace for the Christmas fayre. The games that buzz at you when you touch a shaped wire with a hoop.
Nathaniel
We were making a steady hand game it is a game you need to get all the way across if it beeps you are out. We were in the maker space and mr j wanted us to make a cool game. We made it because all the classes need to make thing for the Christmas fair so people would pay 10p to play and if they win the game you will get a sweet.
Alex
I also used my skills to make a box which is stable enough which was done using the make-do so that I can connect the metal wire to the box and have it not fall over.
Harry
I have also included a light and buzzer but doing that made the buzzer take all the power and the light wouldn’t turn on and the buzzer barely went.
I was with Alexia we had some mistakes like when we were duck taping the crocodile clips but the thing kept falling off it was frustrating but we got to the end eventually we just have to connect the wire.
Faith
In the MakerSpace me and my partner learned how to solve problems, one of the main problems we had was when one of the wires was not working, although it was tedious my partner and I got all the wires tested and turns out the one to actually play the game with was broken, when we found that out we had to swap the wire and wire the game up and it was worth it because it worked really well afterwards.
Olivia
The pupils worked really well with their partners, using their experience with circuits and working with cardboard. I a looking forward to seeing them when they are finished.
We have a couple more stages to go and will be making other games for the attendees of our Christmas Fayre.
We have had a busy week this week. Highlights for me included our work on Earthquakes. The children did some research to find out the basic facts and yesterday made some model seismographs to explore how these instruments works.
We used our research skills to find how about earthquakes.
Mr Wevling started a new science topic, looking at the different states of matter.
The Children rose to the NLC Learning Hub Christmas Engineering Challenge.
We posted an in progress report Christmas Engineering Challenge Part 1 last week.
We lost some time on Friday as no children were in school due to snow.
This week we finished off and have started to make movies of our reindeer. All of the groups managed all of the chilli challenges! Watch the movies to see how. (A couple more currently in production)
We have been lucky enough to borrow some lego kits from NLC Stem. and started to get to grips with the Spike Robot yesterday. As well as the obvious coding and creativity skills this allows the Biggies to practise their excellent team work.
After creating and exploring the science behind our balloon cars yesterday we used them for maths today.
We practised measuring distance in metres & centimetres and time in seconds. Then we calculated the speed of our cars by dividing the distance traveled by the time taken.
thanks to The Royal Institution for the idea Balloon car racers
The Primary Sevens along with Caelan from p6 have been working really hard this term on the First Lego League Challenge :
FIRST LEGO League Challenge teams are introduced to a scientific and real-world challenge for teams to focus and research on. The robotics part of the competition involves designing and programming LEGO Mindstorms robots to complete tasks. The students work out a solution to a problem related to the theme (changes every year) and then meet for regional, national and international tournaments to compete, share their knowledge, compare ideas, and display their robots.
Their team is called the Cog Cats.
The challenge has involved an incredible amount of hard work. Along with the robot challenges went an innovation project where the children had to design a solution to the problem of keeping people active.
The group were also judged on their core values of:
The group have worked on this all term working very independently and show an amazing amount of resilience. Both in the robot challenges and the innovation project the children have had to repeatedly iterate on their work, improving and testing each time.
They have exemplified the school values of Respect, Responsibility Resilience & Compassion
On Thursday 17th June we went along to the virtual South of Scotland heats. The group had to run their robot through the challenges, present on their innovation project and answer questions on their core values.
Although we did not win our heat, we were delighted to be the winners in the Core Values section. I think this victory show what we already know about this primary seven they are pretty decent kids!
After working on some basic circuits we had a challenge today. To make a steady hands game.
The class worked really well on this, working in partners, using nearly all of the skill we could thing of. In particular, practical, communication, creativity and problem solving. We ended up with 100% success and 1 very proud teacher.
Yesterday Afternoon, Mr & Mrs Carter Came in to show us some animal skeletons including a human named Sarah. The skeletons were found by Mr & Mrs Carter, These were badgers, foxes, a human and two roe Deer, one from Dow’s wood and one from Denny. The fox they found in their garden shot and they buried it to get rid of the flesh to leave it with just the bones.
When they came in we went into four groups and our group was Me, Hannah, Lara, Alana and Jessica. We started off with a roe deer from Denny, we had to get all the bones back together to make the animal again. We split into different sections to work on. I made the spine, Jessica was the dentist who made the teeth go back into the skull. Hannah & Alana was putting the rib back together, Finally Lara was putting the arms and legs together.
Secondly we got the badger next we had the same jobs, Jessica had a harder job putting the teeth in this time, all around it was a bit harder because it was smaller than the last one. Lastly we got the roe deer again but it was from Dow’s wood, once again same jobs but we didn’t have that much of a struggle this time cause we already done one similar to the first one.
Now we got the second part of the afternoon it was to just inspect the bones, we started of with the human. The hand was really flexible and weird, the foot was like the same it was really flexible and in the pelvis the was a hole where you could put the leg bone in.
After that we went to the next table and at that table we had a rabbit, a vole, and some beautiful sea shells, Alice was really concentrated on building a rat if you inspected it there was so many little pieces. After That we moved over to our last table and there was a Heron head, a Hedgehog head.
We really enjoyed Mr & Mrs Carter Coming in Yesterday and I hope you enjoyed this report.
We are very proud of two of the Biggies who reached the primary 6 semi final of the Glasgow Science Festival Creating Engineers Competition this year.
