A group of Waikanae students, including Horatio and Oskar from Room 6, programmed mechanical battle-bots to respond to remote control commands and follow tracks, in their recent visit to Mind Labs in Petone. 

 The Mind Lab is the result of collaboration between a public education provider and a specialist lab aimed at enhancing digital literacy capability. The thirteen 10-12 year olds who participated were selected by their teachers as students who have already demonstrated a high level of interest in technology.  The robotics workshop was led by Mind Tech teacher  Malcome Clark who recently came from the UK and taken up a position as the lead tutor.  Mr Clark has previously had extensive  teaching technology and digital literacy in all boys schools, and found robotics led to high levels of student engagement and development of self-management and problem solving skills.  Today's group included three female students and ten boys, all of whom were successful in programming their robot.

Children learnt how to programme and control Battle Robots to respond to inputs from an infrared handset, and also to follow a track using sensors built into the robots, using a software interface to write the code to control them.