Year 6 Technology Team - An End of Year Reflection

One of my targets this academic year has been to set up a pupil group I've christened the 'Technology Team' at my school - several Year 6 children with whom I could do a variety of computing-themed enrichment activities. They are not 'Digital Leaders' - as I teach every class Computing myself and am quite confident that my lessons cover a curriculum that is comprehensive enough, I felt that they were not needed in my school. Instead, I would focus on doing extra tasks with the Technology Team which are slightly more creative than I'd do in a normal lesson and which could be more successively delivered to a small group than in a whole class situation (which requires greater differentiation and less support from me).

Whilst all the children were really enthusiastic and keen to take part, the biggest challenge that I had was actually coming up with the activities to do with them. You might think that I'd find this pretty easy, but trying to plan what was effectively an extra lesson every week for very technology-savvy Year 6 children which developed their skills in a fun way and was sufficiently different to what I already cover with them in my computing curriculum, was actually quite a task. They didn't want to do lots of on-screen programming work every week (as there are only so many online games moving characters around mazes one can do and we mutually agreed that moving onto text based stuff would be slightly too boring for a club) and they obviously didn't want to repeat stuff from lessons (like do yet more e-safety work).

Again, they are not 'Digital Leaders' who - when you search for examples of practice in other schools online - spend lots of time learning apps to support class teachers in Computing lessons (which we don't need) or even just meet once a half-term to do a big thing like a video school tour (which I once did a few years back very unsuccessfully and vowed never to repeat again) or green screening (which from experience I think requires an excessive amount of work for very little gain over just filming in front of an IWB).

 

Instead, I discovered that they wanted to: make mini things to take home that night, solve programming 'quest' games and learn skills they see staff doing daily in school which I don't already cover in lessons (i.e. make classroom resources).

 

I kept the same six children in the group all year so I could experiment with different ideas and get feedback on what they felt were the best and worst activities to know how I could improve on them next time. Here is a quick summary of what we found out:

 

Some of the Least Favoured Activities (I won't do these again)

• I'd been extremely interested in showing them the BBC Micro:Bit - having been part of the initial feedback group at the BBC when it was in its Codebug phase - but on actually trying one out for myself I unfortunately found it to be quite temperamental to operate and slightly too technical to do anything more with than program scrolling messages on. Not worth the hassle.
• I found what appeared to be a cheap app-controlled paper plane motor online which looked amazing - in practice though you needed to have amazing origami skills for the plane to be able to fly under the weight of the motor.
• The online Rapid Router game proved to be a good find initially, with the children liking programming the robot around using Blocky-based commands - sadly their interest began to wane after about 20 levels when the paths became too long for them to visualise easily. Remember it's a club - they want fun stuff that isn't too hard.
• Making a potato clock was actually a great little activity where they loved connecting two potatoes together to act as a battery to power an LCD clock. Unfortunately however, it only needed 15 minutes to do so I under ran quite a bit that week.
• These electric paint robots were very hit-and-miss, and I think they needed a perfectly steady hand to apply the paint to create perfect circuits, which not all of my children had.

Some of the Most Favoured Activities (I will do these again)

• Teaching the children how to operate the sticky label machine was lots of fun - especially changing the font and adding Windings-style symbols.
• Designing Avery sticky labels to print out and take home to give out to their friends was loved by everyone - it's often easy to forget how much children love stickers.
• Making a banner in 2Publish+ and laminating it was actually a surprise hit.
• Creating a 20p stylus (using these instructions) was surprisingly quite straightforward and genuinely impressed the children.
• I came up with a way of making a cheap cardboard photo frame with a sheet of laminate as the 'glass' which they all enjoyed decorating and making one week using this template I made in Word.
• For two lessons, I taught them how to use Flowol to construct flowcharts to control mimics for the first half, followed by letting them explore some logical thinking games on the Math Playground website for the second half. They enjoyed the variety here. 
• They all liked making crafty robots, although next time I would save money and let the children design their own covers rather than buy them ready-made.
• I've used Pivot Animator several times in the past and as usual, making stop-frame animations of stick figures dancing and doing gymnastics was lots of fun - we even had some dabbing!
• Tucked away in a cupboard, I found a CD-ROM of the classic Crystal Rainforest game from Sherston so I took the opportunity to use it with the group and they all liked racing through the quest adventure with each other. This was brilliant and took several weeks to complete - it's a shame they aren't produced any more for people to still buy.
• Plastic key rings are surprisingly cheap to buy online I found out (e.g. these) so that was an easy week - design a front and back in Word, printing them out and snap them inside the case to take home. Simple, but they all loved it.
• Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic is my favourite computer game of all time so when it came out as an app I decided I just had to show it to the children (it does have some excellent STEM links when constructing and testing rides). Of course, they just loved designing and managing their own theme park - who wouldn't?

As well as these activities, I also taught my Technology Team how to use the school DSLR camera and trained them up in using it to capture events in school that I wasn't always around for, such as assemblies. This included tweeting the photos with a pre-written tweet template so they would go online and embed on our school website instantly. They all liked taking their turn at doing this and it proved to be a huge help in showcasing things which parents don't actually see.

 

At the end of the year, I would say that my Technology Team has been a success overall, although I would consider making a few adjustments in future to make it run smoother:

• Have more children take part - I think the demand is easily there to enlarge the group by a few places.
• Get children in Year 5 to complete a short online application form at the end of the year to make the selection process fairer.
• Change the group mid-year - I easily have about 15 weeks worth of lessons that work well so if the demand is there, it makes sense to just repeat them with different children from the class to make my planning easier and give greater exposure to the sessions (my plans can be found here).
• Involve the children on a rota for controlling the hall laptop during assemblies - this is currently allocated as a Year 6 'job' but would be better if the Technology Team children did it instead.
• Let the children support our Year 6 dinner time library monitors tweet mini book reviews from other children (using this prompt sheet).
• Add some Lego programming into the mix which I didn't get the chance to do this year - Lego Boost which comes out in August looks particularly impressive from all the preview material from the CES in Vegas back in January. 

There you go - that's my twisted take on Digital Leaders. How would you implement a 'Technology Team' in your school?