THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF COMPUTING Sophie Lambourne, UIV & Cheuk-Yi Cherie (Sage) Lau, UIV
On Wednesday 20 October, a few Downe House girls visited the National Museum of Computing in Milton Keynes, for a day focusing on young women in STEM. We had so much fun there and all learnt a lot.
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Our first activity was led by RAF military crew. We had to build a secure telecom tower out of nuts, bolts, washers and bridges. The goal was to create a free-standing tower with two disks 1.2 metres above the ground, 30cm apart from each other. All three teams completed this goal in under 30 minutes. We had to use a range of STEM skills, such as engineering, design and collaboration. We then went on to learn about the Sphero robot [1 & 2], which was very cool! The Sphero is a ball that flashes and lights up. You can move the ball around using controls on an iPad, or you can program it to do certain things. We experimented with different games, my favourite being ping pong. In this game, the Sphero moves in random directions, but when it encounters another object, such as your hand, it changes colour. It then makes a ‘boing’ noise and moves in another direction. We also played snake with the Sphero, with a small screen on the robot being the game screen.
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