STEAM News | Preparatory School

STEAM News | Preparatory School

Science Week:

For National Science Week this year we celebrated Glass: More than meets the eye. Based on the UN International Year of Glass. In STEAM learning times this week boys have been focusing on “What is glass?” through conducting research and experiments.

With various activities across the campus, boys enjoyed creating stained glass windows, completing glass scavenger hunts, researching how glass is made and competing in Kahoots! Each year group also had the opportunity to look into jobs related to glass and tried their own glass blowing using candy.

In addition to this Year 6 undertook a collaborative design thinking challenge with the Junior School where, in teams, they worked together to develop their own functional lightsource.

On Tuesday 30th September …

RoboCup:

On Monday 22nd of August, ten boys from Trinity Prep (aka the Triangle Boiz and Triangle Pigs!) competed at the RoboCup competition at Holy Cross College, Ryde. We were accompanied by the Junior School team, Miss Newton, Mr Mugridge and the Junior School STEAM teacher. Trinity Prep had two teams competing in different specialty areas; OnStage and Riley Rover Rescue. Before RoboCup we were building and coding our robots on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at both recess and lunch in preparation for the competition.

Rory, Chenyu, Omar, Tank and Riley participated in the ‘Riley Rover Rescue’ challenge.

The aim of the rescue competition was to build an EV3 Lego that incorporated colour and ultrasonic sensors to navigate autonomously through a chemical spill. The robot would then move using our pre-programmed code across an obstacle course, using the black line to guide the robot. The robot then reaches the green space and pushes the can out to complete the mission. Before we attended the event we prepared during our lunchtimes to get our robots ready and learn how to programme with black line code. On the day there were nine different tracks where we had to compete to earn points. Part of being on the rescue team was that only one boy was able to talk to the judge and compete at each track while the rest of the team members watched and cheered on from a distance. Overall, it was great fun and we came 24th of all the schools that attended on the day.

The OnStage team that worked on autonomously programming three EV3 robots to perform to music. Our team Domenic, Elijah, Isaac, Laurier and Laurie decided to go with the theme… THE AVENGERS! We had five weeks to make our robots and code them, the robots were made out of lego mindstorms and the app we used to code was EV3 classroom. You don’t need to just use lego though because you were required to decorate your robots with paper and other materials.

We built three robots, Captain America, Iron Man and Thor who were fighting to collect the infinity gauntlet and bring it back to the Avengers base. Thor started off by using his big hammer to knock down a wall that was in the way, then Captain America and his spinning shield to push the remains of the wall away so Thor could go past and knock down some more objects in the way until Iron Man came in clutch and pushed the Gauntlet back to the Avengers base.

In the end we came 5th of the 13 teams attending. Knowing that other teams had been working on their robots to build it and had done the competition earlier in the year we were more than happy with our great result!

Next year Trinity is excited to start working with new teams of boys. If you are in Year 4, 5 or 6 next year and think you will be interested in going to RoboCup please talk to Miss Newton but there are three things that you need to think about before you ask to join:

1. Can you work in a team of five collaboratively? That means you can solve problems without fighting.

2. Can you represent Trinity responsibly and with integrity? There could be 30 other schools and you are representing us, there are times of the day where your group has to work on their own with no teacher. Integrity means doing the right thing even if you think no one is watching.

3. Most importantly, are you interested in or have special skills in coding?

Laurie Earnshaw and Rory Ashcroft | RoboCup Captains

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