Last Friday’s session was with two groups (15 and 16) of S2 pupils from Castlebrae, Westerhailes and Craigroyston Secondary schools. We tried a new workshop “Mindburst” based on lego mindstoms and building bridges from newspapers. Some positive points:
- The hi-tech/low-tech contrast appears to work well with groups of mixed abilities allowing pupils to choose which area to work in.
- The groups were from mixed schools so the concept of team building worked well, the first step being that they had to introduce themselves to the others in their team.
- With a little help all teams were able to meet the bridge challenge (of building a bridge to hold 5kg).
- The majority of pupils were engaged with the projects and had some excellent questions.
Some things to work on:
- Not many of the teams completed the programming part of the challenge. Perhaps a more structured approach to teaching them the concepts is needed to lead them through to success.
- It was challenging to keep all of the group engaged all of the time, although most did engage at some point.
Our HW coordinator said:
A huge thank you to all of you for helping out with today’s visit from Castlebrae, Westerhailes and Craigroyston S2s. The pupils, teachers and Leaps staff all thoroughly enjoyed themselves. I think the pupils will have left with a very positive impression of Heirot-Watt as a warm, welcoming and interesting/fun place. The work that Leaps and ourselves will continue to do with the pupils over the next few years will hopefully have a positive impact on increasing the numbers progressing from school to HE from what are still, very depived communities, and today was a great starting point!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: event, leaps, secondary school
