Year 5 students at Irchester have been working on a very exciting project with the Dept. of Waste Management, University of Northampton. Dr. Waleed Montasser and Louise Maxwell, and Bianca, Evie and Livia (Brazilian visiting students) work alongside our Year 5s to design, plan, resource and make different Science Takeaways all using reusable and recycled materials.
Science Takeaways will be a set of four science kits with different experiments for children to borrow for the weekend and try at home. They will collect data or test hypotheses and add to the kit if they think of some new way of using it.
However, we wanted to keep these takeaways as reusable and “green” as possible and didn’t want to spend a lot of money making them! Waleed had the great idea of using Phoenix Resource Centre in Raunds.
They collect clean usable waste (including off-cuts of material, wood, card), surplus stocks, end of lines and unwanted goods / returns from industry and local businesses. Anything that can be re-used then gets put onto shelves for people to reuse. As you can see we did a great job of finding just the right things we needed!
Today, we have visited the site for the first time to collect and resource our projects. It was a freezing but really cool place and John on of the trustees helped us fill our trolleys! What they are doing there is very good for the environment even the actor who plays Ron Weasly think so and have visited them!
Aimee and Livia are happy with what they have found!
Aimee, age 9, says “I think that this is a good place because it stops all the materials from going into landfill. It makes people reduce waste and reuse things so that we can have a nice county instead of a big smelly dump in the ground!
A selection of the open educational resources that have been released from the School of Science and Technology at the University of Northampton. Based on 28/5/2016 figures.
viewsdownloads C Programming9865372Summary of Evolutionary Algorithms695316Problem-Solving540836Pollution And Pollutants5691269Properties of Ultrasonic Waves642691Sustainability: Environmental Business Imperatives2591
Dr James Xue from Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, University of Northampton and Ahmed Salim (an MSc Computing student) have developed a community-driven, best learning resource sharing website.
Originally developed as his Ahmed's dissertation under James supervision, it is now live at www.learningsmart.co.uk The following are some of the main features: Top-five resource list for each subject area is updated at real-time (nearly) automatically based on real users’ reviews (one user can only review a resource once, this stops fake reviews)Learning resources are classified based on levels of difficulty (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced) so that learners won’t waste time searching for the right resources or reading inappropriate resources.Any contribution (upload and review of resources, interaction with other learners) will be rewarded some points, top contributors are displayed on the home page. As a result, more good resources are expected.Users can create…
I had my first opportunity recently to try an Aldebaran NAO robot as a teaching tool in an AI class. The session was an end of term activity around summarising what we did in the AI class so far and questions.
A question came up around AI and it's impact on society. Perfect opportunity to bring in a social robot - especially as a precursor for when we include a session on social robotics next term.
The robot was part of the investment in STEM teaching part-funded by HEFCE.
The video below shows the robot in action, while I am learning to use it.
All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.