Brain Awareness Week at the LRC

This week the ABC celebrated Brain Awareness Week in many different ways. In the LRC we wanted to mix things up a bit and in doing so prepared quite a few exciting challenges that we had not done before with students.  

Students and staff had a wonderful time before and after school, at breaks and lunches and even in tutor time in one case, as they challenged themselves and each other while exploring the different activities.

The activities that really stood out this year were Spero Robotics mazes and bowling challenges, 3D Pen Printing, Rubik's Cube and Checkers Games (We need to buy more of these as they are so popular that the students want to hold a larger competion!), 5 minute lego challenges, and Chess. 

The 11th grade students who are in their final days of practice for the annual ABC Circus performances, Thursday and Friday even found some time in their busy schedules to come in and play.

It truly was a wonderful Brain Week fulll of laughter, excitement and active learning! We can't wait to do it again, and really Brain Week is every week at the LRC. 
We fully expect all of these activities to continue throughout the year in different ways, as students and staff are now better aware of all of the great activities they can take part in through clubs, the makerspace and regular visits through classes and outside of lessons.

The following is the menu of activities we had available for staff and students to take part in as well as links to explore further.

Have  a Wonderful Week!

LRC Team

Brain Week Activities
Sphero Mini Robot Challenges
Sphero BOLT Robot Challenges
Merge Cube 3D Augmented Reality
Lego Wall Design
3D Design and Printing with 3Doodler Pens
Chess and Checkers
Rubik's Cube Game
Leap Motion Challenges
Makey Makey Input Challenges
LittleBits Circuits and Design Challenges
3D Magnetic Building Tile Discovery

Super Sphero Sumo Match

This year we shook up our 6th grade programming unit by working with Sphero Mini Robots.

The Students did a series of basic online lessons through SpheroEdu and then went on to the final challenge. The challenge was for them to program their Sphero Mini Robots to remain in a circle (roughly 1 Metre in diameter) and try to push the opponent out of the ring.
The first step however was to research Sumo Wrestling and make sure they understood the rules of the match.

Next, they applied what they had learned in ICT lessons to build a sequence of movements with loops to ensure the robot remained within the specified area for a certain amount of time.  They used variables to count log collisions and used what they know about angles, time and speed to write their code. They had to tweak the initial codes quite a bit as often they had set the speed too high. Most students either chose to use star like formations based on angles while others used geometric shape tracing.  The resulting competition when paired with some motivational music was very engaging battle of the bots. What a great way to end the school year!

I have included the video below. Just click to view it.

 

Alternative Link

Cooking Classes at the LRC-Supporting our Life Skills lessons

Written and posted by the LRC Team

We work with other departments in the school, frequently in the LRC and this includes our Heads of Year in support of the Life Skills Program. The sixth grade coordinator recently expressed an interest in the work we were doning with the cooking club this year. The conversation ensued and we decided to put together a whole grade, cooking class. As you can imagine, this is not an easy task to pull off. We don't have a enough equipment for the entire 6th grade to use at the same time, so In the end we decided on a cooking class in which the students needed to follow a recipe to assemble a snack for themselves.

The students had a great time making spider cookies for the class and the teachers had a great time observing them and helping out when needed. The students worked in groups of six at stations, which were placed under cover (since the rainy season is now upon us). They worked as teams as well as independently, learned important lessons in perseverance and resilience when things didn't always go quite the way as they expected (usually this had to do with pretzel spider leg problems),  and learned a very important lesson about sharing spaces with others. In addition to this they worked through a recipe, used a diagram to guide their work and learned some of the basic expectations for working with food. 

The cookies were assembled from crackers, cream cheese, pretzels and raisins were used for eyes. 

It was the first time we introduced food preparation in a Life Skills class. We are planning to do a lot more cooking classes with year groups, probably on a rotational basis and also include some basic sewing activities for Life Skill periods next school year.

Please have a look at the media below to immerse yourself in this exciting activity and do also check out our photo gallery at Flickr.