Throughout the school we have been programming in various forms.  Reception have been busy bees programming their Bee-Bots both practically and on the iPads, whilst further up the school have been learning Scratch.

Over recent weeks, Year 2 have been progressing with their programming skills. Initially, the children revisited programming Daisy the Dinosaur, moving on from inputting simple commands which made her go forward, grow, shrink or jump to using repeat commands.  This took a little more thought, as the challenge was to repeat the commands using minimal instructions. It was a little tricky but we got there with the help of the Repeat function. Continuing on our journey, last week Year 2 shared an afternoon with Year 1 showing them how to code using Kodable on the iPads. After listening to the story of how the fuzzFamily crash landed their spaceship on the planet Smeeborg we got stuck in to help the fuzzFamily explore the fascinating Technomazes of Smeeborg. In order for a fuzzFamily member to exit the maze the children had to program simple instructions (having learned that an algorithm is an instruction) for each creature. To gain maximum points they needed to collect the gold coins along the way. Kodable provides children with much needed experience of sequencing instructions and it was great to see the all the children enjoying their successes. Year 1 are now ready to help the fuzzFamily on their own! Good luck Year 1.

The majority of our Juniors and teachers have now completed The Hour of Code as part of their Introduction to Programming. In addition to this, some of our more experienced Scratch users have been assisting in class with the first steps of coding.

Our After School Club is going from strength to strength.  By the end of last term the word-on-the-code went viral amongst the lower Juniors and we are now bursting at the seams.   All the children are learning how to program using Scratch and so far they have programmed fireworks exploding, chomping fish and flying spaceships.  It never ceases to amaze me how quickly children find their feet with technology and application and Scratch is no exception.

In addition to learning Scratch and with the prospect of two Raspberry Pi computers being flown to the International Space Station as part of Tim Peake’s mission, Rode Heath Coders are to enter the Astro Pi project.  The project is to devise and describe an original idea for an experiment or application that can be conducted on the Astro Pi by Tim Peake during his mission.  The two best submissions will get the opportunity to work with the Astro Pi team to interpret their ideas and the team at the Raspberry Pi Foundation will then code them ready for flight on the ISS. Get your thinking caps on coders!

Mission X Train like an Astronaut has begun at Rode Heath School.

Over the last couple of weeks the Year Three class have been mentoring the other classes in the school. It was decided that rather than just showing staff in a staff meeting how Mission X worked and doing a one off demonstration lesson after school with a group of children, it would be more beneficial and engaging to show the teachers and their own class a demonstration lesson during school hours.

Each class was shown some of the Mission X videos relevant to their year group and a quick guide on the Mission X website. The Astro Agility, Martian Mountain and the Mission Control activities being common to most classes but adapted to suit the ability. For instance the climbing frames were used for Martian Mountains for all classes apart from Y5 and Y6 who used the ropes. Build an Astronaut Core and Do a Space Walk were demonstrated for Years 5 and 6 as well.

60 children in the school hall took some managing especially with a reduced area due to building work and a particularly busy timetable. After watching a couple of the Mission X videos, a dance warm up for all prepared everyone for the activities. First, each activity was demonstrated and then in groups, a rotation of five activities was then set up. Using partners, the children timed themselves on the Mission X activities. Next the class watching had the opportunity to join in, guided by the Year 3 children and the teachers. It was really good to see Year 3 children mentoring reception children as it gave them a sense of greater responsibility and the conversations going on were very informative. It all seemed to work well for the demonstrations.

What now? Well each class now has a guide sheet on how to teach the Mission X and manage their own P.E. session with the resources available. The hall timetable will need some adjustments to fit everyone in during each week. Monitoring of results (times, heart rates, comments) is something each class can adapt although there is a guide sheet they can use to start with. Around the school there is definitely a sense of energy and enthusiasm for Mission X. Over the last few weeks there have also been sporting competitions which have emphasised to the rest of the school how important it is to train and keep fit.

What an amazing day we had at MMU on Wednesday, courtesy of Clare Pheasey and her team. What an incredible opportunity for our KS2 children to experience at first-hand, life on a university campus.

The main purpose of the day was to launch the Train like an Astronaut element of our Out of This World project and we were lucky enough to be joined by Heather MacRae, who runs the event on behalf of the UK Space Agency. However, the day was much more than that – it was to demonstrate to our Rode Heath children what they could aspire to, through hard work and commitment to their learning.

The events started, for the Year 6 and 5 pupils, with a series of tours around the campus where they had the opportunity to interact with real students and ask them questions about university life. Most intriguing for some of the Y5s seemed to be the fact that you had to pay to do your own laundry.

Following that we were invited to a lecture room where we listened to Dr Stephen Lynch talk about robots. He entertained us with a series of video clips showing various examples of robotic technology, including a robotic fish that is used to measure pollution and the Lego CubeStormer which can solve a Rubik’s cube in 5 seconds.

The children listened, spellbound, as they learned about Robonaut, the first dexterous humanoid robot in space and the first US-built robot on the ISS. Ultimately, robots like these could help build space stations on the moon for humans to inhabit, the obvious advantage being that they do not suffer from human limitations – such as oxygen deprivation – and would be much cheaper to send into space.

Perhaps one of our Rode Heath pupils might even be involved in their development in the future. Who knows?

Finally, the children had the opportunity to handle a real robot. Even though the Sony robotic dog, Aibo, is relatively old technology, it is still incredibly addictive and captivated the children as it responded to their stroking by wagging its tail, moving its body and making dog-like noises.

To earn the chance to engage with Aibo, pupils had to ask a question about robotics and I was very pleased with the scientific nature of their responses. They had obviously been very motivated by the subject matter.

Lunch was taken in the student refectory – much to the bewilderment of some of the staff and students, who seemed completely unaware of our visit. To suddenly have your space invaded by 50 primary aged children is probably quite alarming. It certainly freed up a few tables. Having feasted upon chicken dippers and chips and having wiped up the deluge of squash that was spilt by children missing the last step on their way to grab a seat next to their friends, we set forth enthusiastically to the Sports Hall for the main activities of the afternoon.

These consisted of two workshops. One was a team-building session run by the Outdoor Education students. This involved the children working together to cross the sports hall on a pair of very large horizontal stilts. Hermione in Y5 was magnificent as a leader – she would make a perfect cox! They also had to transverse a “deadly acid swamp”, which required a great deal of co-ordination and balance.

The second set of workshops involved the children performing a series of fitness challenges using specialist MMU equipment such as jump mats and starting gates. They were able to collect data which measured key components of their fitness including stamina, lung capacity, power and upper body strength.

All this activity was filmed by a quadcopter circling above the children – a great set of clips for our final Rolls Royce video. You should be able see the results shortly on http://trainlikeanastronaut.org/.

For many children, the highlight of the day however was the opportunity to spend a few minutes in the University’s environmental chamber. This gave them a real feel for what it might be like to work in extremes of temperature – just like astronauts. At -20⁰C, it certainly was cold! After about a minute my camera hand started to shake, resulting no doubt in quite wobbly footage.

All too soon the day was over and it was time to leave. We’d had a marvellous day and learned a great deal.

Back in school, there was yet another surprise for the children. Garry Pheasey and his team had designed and produced a Rode Heath/MMU/Out of This World ruler for each of the Year 5 and Year 6 children who had attended the event. Having watched a short video explaining how the rulers had been made, I gave the rulers out to the excited Year 5s.

And what’s the first thing that they did with them? As if orchestrated, they all instinctively balanced the rulers on one finger to find the centre of gravity! Charlie even commented on the fact that the Sun was in the middle of the ruler, which was fitting as this was its position in the Universe (something we had been discussing in Monday’s science lesson!)

This tells me that our project is working . . . .

My goodness, we may only have been in school for four days, but we have certainly hit the floor running. It seems ages since I have written about the project. The first term was so hectic; I still can’t believe we achieved so much. Right up until the last day of term, space continued to be a major part of our daily diet with a rendition of Chris de Burgh’s ‘A Spaceman Came Travelling’ even featuring in our Year 5 Carol Service. Indeed one of our last activities was to respond to the NASA interns’ All About That Space parody – and what fun we had, making our own music video. Being spontaneous can often inspire creativity – check out the results for yourself if you haven’t already done so.

The New Year promises even more challenges for the children, all with Space at their heart. This week the Year 5s were studying measures in Numeracy. Over the Christmas holiday, I was fortunate enough to discover (via Twitter) the excellent book by Nick Tiley-Nunn entitled ‘How To Teach Primary Maths’, so I decided to kick off the year with his activity using popcorn as a unit of measurement. This provided a great deal of excitement and produced much excellent maths and discussion about why popcorn was not the most accuracy method. It also presented the opportunity to tweet Tim Peake to inform him that he was 100.15 units of popcorn high, to which he dutifully responded. After all, we have to link to space somehow! There was so much value in the investigation that we devoted most of the day to it

For the rest of the afternoon we talked about the historical evidence that existed for the Earth being spherical (why is that such a difficult word for children to say?) and this led to our Big Write on Wednesday morning being a letter from Galileo to one of his doubting students, persuading him of that fact. Another example of how the topic of space can pervade all areas of the curriculum.

The best however was saved until last with Sarah Gallagher-Hayes from http://www.twigtwisters.co.uk/v2/ coming in to do two days of Space Art with the children. Our focus was to create a number of large sculptures from mixed media with wicker as an underlying structure. The results were amazing and it was wonderful to see different year groups working closely with each other – particularly the Year 6 children with the Year 2s.

Other year groups, not involved with the large wicker work created their own fabulous art, inspired by our Out of This World project. Year 1 made rockets and 3D models of the planets from wire and Modroc; Year 3 designed lunar bases using art straws; Year 5 took photographic images from the ISS and put their own slant on them. Not to be outdone, Reception made their own aliens and designed underpants for them – some of them were spectacular! Truly a diverse range of creativity.

What has been encouraging is the cross curricula opportunities that have arisen through undertaking this space art, particularly in the areas of maths – measuring, 3D shape identification, proportion to name but a few – right down to Reception and KS1, where the children have had the opportunity to use the language associated with measurement.

Next week is going to be even more exciting for the Juniors. We are launching the Mission X element of our project with an event at MMU in Crewe. Here we will be taking advantage of the expertise of real sports scientists and using their sophisticated equipment to experience what it is really like to train like an astronaut. The data we collect will be taken back to school and used in our maths lessons: real, purposeful learning. What could be better than that?

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