| Interactive
Primary Newsletter 29 Technological Magic, Ears & Roamer |
| When the ear begins to hear and
the eye begins to see2 In our experience there has been considerable goodwill from teaching staff in primary schools in coming to grips with ICT. This has, in the main, been directed at learning to understand and use word processors, e-mail, web browsers and spreadsheets. To date, we have not seen much evidence of the use of computers in control and certainly none with robot arms. Perhaps we have not been looking hard enough; if you do have a robot in your school an e-mail to SSERC would be most welcome. Information on the use of robot arms can be found in News 26.
Figure 5 Roamer What we have found in schools are ‘ROAMERS’ (Figure 5), lots of them, some underused because batteries are so expensive, others because the teacher who bought them has left and no-one has had time to dust them off and begin again. However, on a more positive note, we have been told that the employment of classroom assistants has helped teachers make more use of such equipment, as they are available to check batteries, lay out mats and supervise groups etc. One method of addressing many of the outcomes in the strand Controlling and Modelling is to use Roamer. Consider the following simple exercise. Ask or ‘command’ a pupil to stand, turn right, walk forward two steps and then stop. What were the steps in this simple exercise? We used speech (sound) to tell our subject to move. Sound enters the ear (Figure 6 below) as a series of waves.
Figure 6 Diagram of the ear These waves pass into the ear and vibrate a membrane called the eardrum. The vibrations of the eardrum cause some small bones (in fact the smallest bones in the body) called the hammer, anvil and stirrup to also vibrate. These vibrations are then passed to small hairs in the cochlea and converted to an electrical signal that passes along nerves to the brain. Further electrical stimuli are then sent via nerves to those muscles required to produce movement. This is a much-simplified version of what happens in the complex system that is the human body. However, could this simple investigation not be used to cover the senses, energy and ICT? 2 Emily Bronte The Prisoner |
