Primary 6/7

Mr McPhee

Primary 6/7 decided to use the Peachy Keen and RHET competition to design a pedal-powered food production machine as the basis for a STEM topic. This became a multi-disciplinary topic, incorporating not only STEM but also maths (measuring), English (writing non-fiction – note-taking and design briefs) and ICT (creating and editing videos, and using internet to perform research). This took several stages: researching which foods farms produce and how they can be made; writing a formal design brief; sketching initial ideas for their design; and making working models of their design. Children looked at different foods and the requirements for them – both in terms of markets and their nutritional benefits. In the end, they chose foods whose production could be assisted by pedal power, and these included:

• Butter (churning)
• Mixing silage for the differing needs of cattle
• Coring fruit (pineapples)
• Cleaning eggs

They also are undertaking a technology project at the same time, using the coding program Scratch to find out how to write scripts that make computers do what they want to do. In the end, they will create a simple computer game for their partners to try out.