Hillside Primary & Nursery School children visit university for inspiring STEM event

Hillside Primary & Nursery School children visit university for inspiring STEM event

Hucknall’s Hillside primary children impress in robotics challenge

Year 5 and 6 children from Hillside Primary & Nursery School headed to Manchester University to take part in a nationwide coding competition sponsored by the RAF and Coding Success.

Representing Hucknall’s Hillside Primary & Nursery School were pupils Annie, Eddie, Lily, Roqaiya and Tavis, along with their team leader, Joshua.

The competition saw teams given three timed robotics challenges, each requiring children design and build their own robots, and create coding programmes using the LEGO Spike app to make their robots move and complete tasks.

Year 5 Teacher Laura Lane explained, “The children threw themselves into the challenges, working together brilliantly and showing incredible resilience, creativity and determination.

Their hard work paid off in a big way, when out of 15 teams, -including a team of teachers and mostly secondary school groups, Hillside children came 2nd overall. An absolutely fantastic achievement and one they should all be extremely proud of!”

Year 5 pupil Roqaiya took part and said, “I really enjoyed the experience at Manchester University, it was really good fun! The coding challenges were a bit tricky, but when our robot didn’t work for the practice session, we didn’t give up and got it working perfectly. I was so proud of my team, and I hope we can go again next year. I love engineering and want to be an Engineer when I’m older.”

To support their children’s learning, Hillside Primary & Nursery School staff have also been kept busy, developing their own skills to provide further opportunities for coding and robotics to be implemented into their classrooms.

Laura said, “To make sure we are providing the most up to date science and technology skills to our children, as a staff we needed to do some training ourselves! I undertook some training last year funded by The Smallpeice Trust and Raising Robots, who provided our school with the 2 Lego SPIKE kits for implementing robotics and coding into our classrooms.”

Laura says Hillside Primary & Nursery School wants to be a leader in STEM subject delivery and will continue to work with the Coding Success programme, whose aims are to help teachers boost their students’ coding and robotics skills.

The programme itself was commissioned by BAE Systems and the Royal Air Force to promote engineering and technology in schools, focusing on inclusion, ensuring all young people are given the opportunity to engage in engineering activities.

Laura said, “We’ve also been participating in STEM projects supported by The Smallpeice Trust and the RAF Road to RIAT team and actually won the Midlands region competition 2 years ago. The winning prize was tickets to the Royal International Air Tattoo in Gloucester, and our children had the opportunity to explore the Lego SPIKE robotics kits there too. All of these opportunities are inspiring and enthusing our children’s efforts, showing that engineering is for everyone, whatever their gender or background.”