May's Field Trip for GESM Primary
by Ben Storer
On Wednesday, 31st May, Grade 3e, Klasse 3d and Klasse 4d ventured into the realms of robotics on their field trip to RoboThink in Alabang.
The children of both English Primary and German Primary left around 9.00am Wednesday morning and set off on their trip, their spirits high, singing songs and playing games on the school buses. In attendance for the GESM teaching staff were Mr. Korbinian Hook and Mrs. Tina Barthel from the German section, and Mr. Ben Storer representing PYP.
Once inside the centre, the children were awestruck at all of the robot builds on display. After a few minutes of looking around and putting their bags away, they began their lesson by watching some of BattleBots best robot-fighting videos. They figured out, very quickly, that they would be first building their own battlebots themselves. They were pumped to say the least.
All children were then ushered over to their classroom and their relevant desks where they were paired or teamed up. They were all very behaved, with excellent etiquette, and read the information aloud and clearly before beginning their builds. The children were principled in how they collected their materials before they began their task.
Then, it was building time! All students became thinkers, inquirers and risk-takers in trying something completely new to them. The trickiest part was the wiring assembly on the motors to the receivers - the children found out that there was only one way in which the wiring would match up to the correct controls on the control pad, and that every other way would either not work, or their controls would be backwards.
All-in-all the chassis of the battlebots were made in around 20-25 minutes, and the rest of the lesson they all added their modifications. Then, it was time to battle!
On their lunch break, students watched some of the film, Next Gen, on Netflix, a movie about a futuristic world with robots.
After they were re-energised with full tummies, the students were then directed to a differentiated task - each table had different robots - a motorcycle, a water mill, a knight bot, a plane, a helicopter, and a mini-tank, to be exact. This was a more difficult blueprint to build from, but most of the GESM students managed it.
But… eventually it was time for us to leave (though not without a free t-shirt!) All on the way home, the children could not stop talking about their experiences and how much fun they had.
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