By Callum Ludwig
A generous donation from the Rotary Club of Wandin has provided students at some local schools with an opportunity to learn a crucial modern-age skill.
Through Rotary District Grants which were then distributed by the local club, Wandin Yalloc, Coldstream and Seville Primary Schools have been able to purchase Ozobots to share amongst their students and help them learn coding and robotics.
Assistant Principal of Wandin Yallock Primary School Ben Straughair said the initiative is helping to provide students with hands-on learning experiences in coding, problem-solving, and robotics—skills that are increasingly valuable in today’s world.
“Usually we are limited to using digital devices when introducing students to coding, so the Ozobots will provide a new opportunity for students to learn which is extremely important in student achievement and growth,” he said.
“As the Ozobots have just arrived, the select few students have enjoyed learning the basic controls of the Ozobots, we have seen real excitement as the students begin to use basic programming skills to control the Ozobots in a range of different ways,”
“We hope the students gain an insight into how coding can help structure programmes, online games and how this can then progress into future inventions to allow humans to live easier lives.”
Ozobots have two functions for kids to learn to code with: ‘Color Codes’ and ‘Blockly’.
With Color Codes, a screen isn’t even required, students can use coloured markers to draw paths on white paper. The Ozobots will travel along paths and are triggered to perform different functions by a change of colour, including changing speed or spinning.
While testing what they could do with the Color Codes mode, Wandin Yallock and Coldstream students shared some of their thoughts:
“They are interesting definitely, it’s amazing to be honest and it’s very fun,” Lucas from Coldstream Primary School said.
“I’m very grateful because we wouldn’t have had these, we probably wouldn’t have had the money to buy these ever, and it’s a cool thing we can do in STEM to use them for fun projects,” Charlotte from Wandin Yallock Primary School said.
“It was confusing at the start but then you get the hang of it, I enjoy it (STEM) a lot because it’s fun and interesting…thank you to Rotary for giving us the oney to pay for this.”
The Blockly mode is more like traditional coding; using easy-to-understand ‘blocks’ of code, students can put together a string of functions to program the Ozobots to perform,
Rotarian Peter Johnson said it’s fantastic to see the kids using the Ozobots, because they help local schools when they have different sorts of projects and this is something completely different to what they’ve done in the past.
“It’s a changing world, so we’re going to look at different opportunities and this would get their minds thinking and inspire them to look at things in a different way,” he said.
“We offered the local schools help with any projects that they wanted some help with and Alex (Harvey), the STEM teacher from Wandin Yallock approached us and said that they were looking at this robotics program and they wanted to share it with two other schools, Coldstream and Seville,”
“It’s very satisfying (to see students enjoying the Ozobots) because it’s all about getting the kids interested and inspired and looking at different ways of thinking about things and I think this is a good example of how that helps them think a bit more outside the box.”
$2500 was raised by the Rotary Club of Wandin towards the Ozobots, which was matched by the Rotary Foundation through a Rotary District Grant.
Mr Straughair said without the generous funding from Wandin Rotary, they wouldn’t be able to afford something so valuable to the students’ learning.
“Having the idea to share and rotate different resources across the three schools as a STEM Resource Hub has increased the opportunities for learning for a much larger number of students which we believe is pretty cool,” he said.
“We are grateful for the wonderful community partnerships in our local area and want to say thank you to Peter and Wandin Rotary for assisting in the funding and organisation of receiving the Ozobots.”
