One area of work in Year 3 is about Australian states and territories and the student have been involved in a diverse range of activities designed to enhance their understanding. The content descriptor from ACARA is:
The representation of Australia as states and territories and as Countries/Places of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples; and major places in Australia, both natural and human(ACHASSK066)
Concurrently we have been delving into the Digital Technologies Curriculum with one class. After exploring the use of Dash for visual programming, the teacher, Christine Spencer and I talked about the possibility of a game using a large map of Australia. Our first prototype of this game involved small groups, a dice with Australian places on each face and a pack of questions and answers that the kids researched and wrote about Australia.
The children had to take it in turns to answer a question from their pack of cards and if they got it right, they then were able to roll the dice and program Dash to get to the next location. The notion of ‘IF THEN’ statements were something we were able to talk about in an ‘unplugged sense’ as this related to the question and answer stage of this game -rather than the visual programming.
Before we started the game, we were also able to refer to this concept by showing the children a project being worked upon by some Year 5 entrants in the Young ICT Explorer’s Competition. This project was a ‘RubbishBot’ which is programmed to move around and IF coming across rubbish, to THEN stop and make a noise and pick it up. We all talked about other robotic devices that are programmed to behave in this way.
The children had a lot of fun and Christine and I think that with a few tweaks, the game could be improved for next term and for another class. This might include writing the question and answer cards about things they can see clearly on the map and spending time in the lead up term regularly writing the cards so that it wasn’t as time consuming a task as it turned out being.
An amusing complication was that if they included a celebratory ‘burp’ from Dash when he arrived at his location, the force of this action would push him back 20cm.
ACARA Digital Technologies
Implement simple digital solutions as visual programs with algorithms involving branching (decisions) and user input(ACTDIP011)
Interesting also to think about the areas of Maths which were creeping in with this activity – the students were selecting measurements (we found that the entire distance east – west on the map was around 70cm) and decide on angles to make him turn.