Something a little different for me this week. The QLD government recognizes the difficulty remote school encounter, providing the activities that are readily available to their city schools counterparts. As a result, they have funds and grants available to bring activities like mine out to them. This last week I have spent out at a school, a 2hr plane flight and 5hr drive from my usual area.
It was the largest school in the area with an enrollment of 35, and we had other schools in the cluster drive in (1.5hrs each way in some cases) to do do the workshop. We were keen to involve the whole school, preps to grade 7, so it was decided that we would split the groups in to P-3 and 4-7.
Now the P-3’s would struggle with the NXT’s so I splashed out and got some BeeBots.
These cute little robots just have Forward, Backwards, Left and Right buttons on them and no computer interface, perfect for the littlies. I’ll make a separate post about the BeeBot activities we did.
For the upper schools we concentrated on the NXT’s and my usual workshop of getting the robots to maneuver to different locations. The kids also really enjoyed the Mexican Wave activity.
It was a great week, and the small numbers in each session made it possible to spend a bit more time with the kids and get a little further. The teachers were also fantastic, with country hospitality evident everywhere (it seems everyone in the town knew me and what I was doing there 😀 ). They were also very appreciative of the fact that I came out at all, as I get the feeling that it can sometimes be difficult to get people and activities out there.
