Making with Andrew King….author/engineer

imageAndrew King…Author and Engineer…tinkerer extraordinaire!

Wow! Such a fabulous day with Andrew King. He inspired our girls with his delightful stories of Engiibear’s Dream and Engibear’s Bridge http://engibear.com/. Megan and I love inspiring our makerspace activities through literature.

planesflyingflyAndrew challenged the girls to making planes and landing them on a runway without crashing into the terminal building!

Girls in Year 4 and 5 designed a bridge to connect two land masses and it needed to be able to hold 500g.

bridge

We were happy to have 100 per cent success! Go girls!

Plenty of FUN and Engineering principles!

 

 

imageAndrew spent time with the girls during lunch time in our Coding and Robotics Club. He helped to program our robot to change colours as it flashed lights.

We then took the robot into our dark room…..it can be seen in the video below…..programmed to move in circles until it sees the torch light and it then moves forward!

robots 5

Andrew has visited us a number of times to talk about the development of his game ‘BlocknFlick’ which he started when his children were young. He talks about designing, iteration and failure and how long it can take to develop and be successful in creating an idea! We were fortunate to play and experiment with both the physical game and electronic game. Andrew laughs as he tells how he made the physical game to encourage his children away from screens! Now of course, the game is an App ‘Flikkbot’ on the iPad!

Here are some photos and video of Andrew with our students enjoying a session of playing and evaluating the games.

flikk flikkbot and1

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 2016 Andrew featured in ‘Headstart’ in the Courier Mail.

Oh! Did I mention soon to be a TEACHER! Woohoo!newspaper

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Jackie Child
Jackie Child has been teaching primary aged students for 40 years in a number of countries. She is passionate about how children learn through constructivist pedagogy. She is a Teacher Librarian at St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School and a sessional tutor at Griffith University for pre-service teachers. Jackie doesn’t believe in standing still, there is always plenty to ‘do’ and learn!