About

Join one or both excursions at Scienceworks:

Robots & Coding

This 45 minute hands-on robotics workshop lets kids practise their STEM skills as they learn to code a robot to be a self-driving, autonomous car. With additional challenges, this program allows kids to engage at many levels.

Children will experience:

• Using block-based coding on iPads to design and code instructions for a robot
• Open ended challenges to practise critical and creative thinking, algorithmic thinking, and collaboration
• Live problem solving as they debug their robot

Children will learn:

• How to apply computational thinking to solving a problem
• An introduction into block-based coding
• How code commands give sequential commands to a robot
• That sensors give inputs to a robot that can change how a robot acts, based on its programming
• To develop their technological proficiency through using robots and iPads

Other key information:

• This program uses mBots

Tinkertown

Pushes and pulls, materials and design, motors and gears, coding and creation! Let kids imagine, design and create by building their imagination.

In this 60 minute self-guided exhibition, excursion students will engage with the engineering design process by building cubby houses and other imaginative structures.

Solve challenges, send secret messages and invent wacky contraptions. There are endless possibilities for engineering and play-based learning.

Children will experience:

• The engineering design process while engaging with hands-on design challenges
• Designing and building inventions with the end-user in mind
• Loose-parts and building materials to spark open-ended or guided tinkering
• Communication, coding and creation through interactive and manipulatable patterns and puzzles
• Building a soft cubby with masses of magnetic cushions
• Coding a message on a giant fidget popper wall
• Sending a secret message over the airwaves with whisper tubes

Children will learn:

• Which shapes are the strongest and how we use this knowledge in design thinking
• How an object’s material, size, and shape impact its purpose, movement and function ·
• How to design an invention for the end-user ·
• How forces can be used to alter the speed and direction of objects ·
• How art is integrated into design and inventing

Session timetable:

• 10.50am: families arrive for an 11am group entry
• 11.30am: Robots & Coding workshop. Non-participating families can wander Scienceworks
• 12.15pm: workshop ends
• 12.30pm: Tinkertown session
• 1.30pm: Session ends, families can stay at Scienceworks for general viewing

More info:

• Price:
  • Tinkertown: $9 per child
  • Robots & Coding: $11 per child
  • Adult: $5, limit one per family
  • Sibling under 3y: free
• Robots & Coding workshop for ages 8y-12y only. Sorry, no non-participating siblings are able to attend
• Robots & Coding workshop required to have minimal number of adults attending. Where possible, please send friends in together with one parent

HEN members only, new members very welcome!

Date

Location

Get directions

Scienceworks
2 Booker St, Spotswood Vic 3015

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