Last Friday, I visited The Hyde School  in North London to help them launch their robots topic. As usual, I went equipped with a large number of robots. The day consisted of an assembly, followed by some Ozobot workshops for their KS1 classes. In the best ‘Blue Peter’ fashion, not quite all of the robots decided they wished to play ball during the assembly. Meccanoid saved the day though. The gasp that went up when it was activated was quite amazing! I quite forgave it the corny joke that it came out with. And the good old autonomous robots, the VEX Ant and Strandbeast, were also very well received.

I thought I’d got quite a good plan for the workshops, but I’d overestimated my ability to get the ideas across. The children who came to the first workshop did their best, but it was pointed out to me that a change was needed. Filling in Ozocodes was just a little too difficult for them. So the children ended up making their own tracks for the Ozobots to follow. It wasn’t quite as I’d intended, but still, it was another form of coding, and one that the children all managed. It was great that some of them, particularly the Y2s, got far enough that they managed to use some of the basic Ozocodes to them for programming. That was really, really cool.