Schoolchildren at Kenton Primary School have received a boost to their computing skills learning, thanks to three Exeter businesses.
Amos Lighting, Devondale Electrical and Oneserve joined forces to sponsor the purchase of robots based on Crumble programmable software, to help the children gain a better understanding of coding.
Learning to code is part of the new computing curriculum, and until the businesses stepped in, children were limited to seeing their programmes on a screen rather than running in a real situation.
Co-ordinator of ICT at the school, Mrs Linda Baker said: “Writing code in block form can be confusing for the children, but seeing it work with a robot really helps them.”
Mrs Baker came across the product when browsing the Computing at Schools website and immediately thought it would be perfect for her students.
“Now the children can write their code and input it to their Crumble robot and watch how their programme performs. If it doesn’t work or there’s a glitch, they can debug it and see the difference,” she said.
Nicola Amos from Amos Lighting, Jodie Wood representing Devondale Electrical and Mark Faircloth, a Software Architect from Oneserve visited to the school to see the robots in action.
Nicola commented: “The children clearly enjoy working with these robots; we were all very impressed with the way they got on with the programming and how confident they were with the software.”
Currently children from Years 5 and 6 are benefitting from the new robots, with Years 3 and 4 to have the opportunity later in the year.
The Crumble programmable controller from Redfern Electronics has been designed for use by children in Key Stage 2, 3 and even 4.
It has proved to be a big hit with all the children, and one said: “We really, really like the robots – you can tell them what to do, and they do it!”
