Alongside our friends at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories with our supporters of RSPB and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we provided over 130 young people from three Oxfordshire schools with the opportunity to get active with micro:bits, lots of coding and a taste of AI.
In the huge RAL visitor centre we hid images of local birds on walls, near exhibits and even on the floating hanging planets of Saturn and Jupiter. This activity was all about connecting children with nature on their doorstep and importantly, how we can use technology to monitor patterns, collect and data log frequencies, visualise and make important decisions.
Children coded micro:bits with different radio channels so they could send messages about birds they had spotted while their partner recorded the frequencies to mimic how we might centrally record data without making noise. To do this they used programming constructs such as sequence, selection and modular approaches creating functions using the MakeCode programming environment. To introduce them to the concept of radio transmission, networks and protocols we allowed them to have a fun game of “chuck-a-duck” keeping the bird theme to see how far they could transmit a graphical representation of a duck across the large space.
Then came the AI… We wanted to show the pupils who were in Year 5 and Year 6, how we could use AI to check patterns in the X, Y and Z axis of an accelerometer to predict bird movements. We asked pupils to hold the micro:bit and pretend to flap like a duck, soar like a kite and even run like an ostrich! By training the micro:bits with this data they used machine learning to then act out a range of birds to see what percentage matched the micro:bit depicted. Another way of helping pupils see how physical computing can be fun and active.
We’d like to thank the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories for such a wonderful day and even more, the young people and their teachers that attend the workshops.
You can access some of these resources from our website if you want to use them in your school, youth or community group:
To find out more about our impact with communities and schools with Bird Watch, take a look at our impact report:
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