The robots are coming. We’ve been named as the first national robotics hub!
We’re absolutely thrilled to announce that we have been chosen as the first UK WER (World Educational Robotics) national robotics hub for primary school children! This comes following our successful bid to the Girls Day School Trust (GDST) and HSBC Partnership Funding to buy educational robotics kits.
We introduced WER Robotics onto the Year 5 curriculum in September 2019 as part of science lessons and teachers Mrs Williams and Mrs Pooley, who have written the robotics curriculum are delighted with how it has been received.
“We made a bid to the GDST for £5000 to purchase robotics kits to introduce it to our curriculum. The skills children can learn through using the WER Robotics are endless from problem solving and creativity to resilience and communication. The robots are programmed using C+ and don’t come with instructions so the girls really have to experiment and use lots of trial and error to get the robots to do the things they want them to do.”
As part of the bid, Mrs Williams and Mrs Pooley also designed lessons and planning resources for local primary schools in Sheffield and so far they have delivered the lessons to Year 5 pupils at Ecclesall Primary School and after Easter, they will be visiting Nether Green Junior School.
“The bid to HSBC enabled us to buy 20 robotics kits which means we can also go into local primary schools to teach robotics. We want to get children across Sheffield learning about robotics from a young age and also competing in the World Educational Robotics Challenge which takes place annually, with the final taking place in China.
This year, we will host the first UK WER regional final in conjunction with Discovery STEM, based at Kelham Island Museum. The regional final will see teams from Ecclesall, Totley Primary, Tinsley, Dronfield, and Sheffield Girls’ take part in the 2020 WER Challenge to gain their place in the European Final which will takes place at the Octagon in July 2020.
Speaking about the competition, Science Teacher, Mrs Williams said:
“The theme for the WER challenge this year is ‘Internet is everything’ and the teams will need to complete a programming challenge as well as present their idea to a team of judges.
It has been amazing to see how quickly the children have learned to use the robots and taking part in the WER challenge enables them to show off what they can do.”
A huge thank you to WER UK for selecting us and we're looking forward to continuing work to incorporate robotics and robotic programming into our bespoke Fusion Curriculum.