Dick Sblog

Take a look at the article ‘Grids and Kids‘ in the latest issue of the quarterly newsletter of the UK National Grid Service (NGS).

Georgina Ellis from SGI introduced Year 6 at her local primary school to the wonders of grid computing with a little help from the National Grid Service.

The NGS supports a number of initiatives for schools and colleges and, when approached by St Johns Primary School in Wetley Rocks Staffordshire, they were happy to provide resources to their IT Development Day for the Year 6 Students. The Developer Day was devised by Georgina, a Parent Governor and High Performance Computing Salesperson at SGI.

Georgina explained that she “wanted to give an introduction to an aspect of computing that in many cases is unheard of in schools, until University or even PhD level; yet children at this age, 10-11, are more IT literate than any previous generation. However their knowledge is more point and click rather than devise and programme. I wanted the children to see the possibilities afforded by modern computing so they could begin to develop their skills and aim themselves toward them.”

(Now, there’s a revolution… Introducing kids to programming)

During the day pupils were divided into teams and each team was tasked with programming a Lego Mindstorms robot – complete with ultrasonic sensor and electronic compass – to complete an obstacle course including garages to park in and baked bean tins to slalom between! The teams recorded their robot programming experience by making a short video which required the teams to film the programming and trial runs of the robot and to capture their thoughts on the task. Each film was set to music and given titles and credits before being shown on the hall projector as part of the day’s summing up.

Great.