We have had real focus on developing coding across the Academy. Several clubs have formed as a result of the enthusiasm of our pupils.  

OSC  

The Online Safety Cadets (OSC) was a project I set up when I first arrived at NHA and I have been building on each year. With the increase of exposure to social media from a young age and the rise in collaborative gaming with chat features it became necessary to do more than just lessons to address the children’s need to protect themselves in an ever changing environment. The OSC provides another platform for children to develop open conversations about staying safe online. It’s not easy to keep up with the ever changing online world. The OSC provide a bridge for those children struggling to ask for help from an adult. Our main mission is to encourage all children to speak out about concerns and seek help instead of facing it alone.  

This year particularly the OSC has been evolving. This year’s children have developed the club to promote online safety and coding. We have been looking at ways to explore online safety through gaming and have many new projects in the works, so watch this space.  

 

Year 6 Coders of The Future  

Year 6 pupils applied to join afternoon sessions of coding and have got stuck into it! The children are not only enjoying using the various technology and coding programs but also considering the skill path for careers in future. Using a variety of skills and programs, the children have combined being creative with being scientific. They have found a range of strengths in the teams they created and worked well to design and code together. It is especially exciting to see so many of our girls with ambitions to become computer programmers or work for Microsoft. The children can see that computer science is a career pathway for anyone regardless of their gender or race. 

 

 

Coding Club

Lunchtime coding clubs allow our pupils opportunity to access coding outside of lessons. The children access a variety of coding platforms: 

Hour of code, Minecraft, MakeCode, Lightbot, scratch to name a few.  

 

Overtime these clubs have evolved, to see our older children flourish to become confident with coding and share their knowledge and expertise with the younger children. Through the use of these programs the children are developing computational thinking, logical reasoning and problem-solving skills.  

 

FIRST Lego League 

2020 was the first time we entered the FIRST Lego League. We are incredibly proud of our team of year 6 pupils because these children applied their coding skills to a new program: Lego Mindstorms, with impressive results.  

We have a clear journey of coding from EYFS through to Year 6. The little ones begin by exploring coding through play, this develops more formally in KS1 with block coding introduced, to the confident use of block coding and transferring into script coding in KS2. As the children get older, they look more into robot design which incidentally was the trophy our team won at the FIRST Lego League competition this year.  

It was an intense moment. We were taken into a room. The teachers not allowed to speak. The team was split in half. Two children were sent to a desk whilst the other two children to the competition table. Then the interrogation began! At least it was tense for me! The children were completely calm. Enkosi and Lucas were challenged with coding a completely different robot to the one they had created for the competition, so they could show off their coding skills. Next up was Lillianna and Paul who had to demonstrate the team robot, explaining the features they had added and how they aimed to solve the obstacles. Clearly the judges were impressed as the children earned the Robot Design Trophy! 

  

The children had to design and code their robot to solve various tasks. Through their hard work and enthusiasm to developing the robot design and code they even surprised the judges in the match section of the competition by managing to balance the car elevator, something they hadn’t seen any other team do! 

 

The car elevator task was to push the car elevator round.  

However, they got a bonus if it balanced!  (And it did! No hands allowed!) 

 

You can read the Peterborough Evening Telegraph news article here: https://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/peterborough-pupils-excel-building-robots-citys-first-lego-league-tournament-1369911 

Here is example of some coding:  

 

Code used to complete the ‘swing’ challenge:  

Code used to complete the ‘bridge’ challenge:  

Lego League Junior  

Our younger KS2 children also took to the Lego challenge but unfortunately due to the lockdown, they sadly have not yet been able to complete it. However, the children have had a great time exploring Lego WeDo 2.0 and developing their coding skills.