GATE Week 7

Busy busy!  Tournament of Minds and DigiCREST students have had fun this week.  The TOM teams are pulling their challenge solutions together ready for Saturday's regional tournament.  Scripts are being tweaked and staging / props being finalised.  The teams have worked so hard and now at this late hour are striving hard to work around illness and other commitments.  We wish them well for the event this weekend.

The digiCREST students reinforced previous learning about Binary Digits (Bits) using glockenspiels  which was noisy and fun! Individuals chose a 'Bit' and then had to be played by a conductor to create code for different numbers.  High notes were 'off' bits and low notes were 'on' bits.  It took careful concentration to play the codes correctly but everyone had a go at being the conductor and really got into the swing of it.

Then we built on programming knowledge gained last week.  Previously we have explored the roles of the programmer and the tester, looked at writing simple, clear codes and debugging errors.  Yesterday's activity involved the students creating code for various physical activities and then placing them in sequence.  Starts, stops, numbers of repetitions and loops were also added.  The 'programmes' were tested and debugged, with the student taking turns at being the robots following the programmes.  Energetic computer science!!