Room 5 at Raranga Matihiko

 On Monday Room 5 went to Waitangi to participate in our last Raranga Matihiko lesson. We learned about electrical circuits and how they are required to power electronics, we also got to make a simple circuit to help us understand this better. 

We then learned about microbits (little computers that are inside all electronics) and used makecode.com to program it. Our task was to first program the microbit to show our name, this was pretty easy and we completed it quickly. Two of us even managed to program it to sing happy birthday to Whaea Christina as it was her birthday. Our final task was to imagine the special taonga in the museum. We had to write a code that would make the mircobit send an alarm sound and write a warning, that would alert security if the item was picked up. There were some very interesting ideas for what we wanted the warning system to be!

Finally, we got to walk around the museum, looking at how a microbit can pick up temperature and light in the museum to protect the taonga. 

We had a really awesome day and learned heaps!  Massive thanks to Whaea Kerry and Whaea Christina for helping us through the world of block coding. We look forward to using the programs more in our learning.