AS PRESIDENTS AND PRIME MINISTERS lined up for today’s ‘Hour of Code’ event - Year 3 at Phurt le Moirrey spent all afternoon along with their teacher Mr Rout-Moore getting to grips with two programming tools - FLOWOL and of course ‘SCRATCH’.

FLOWOL introduces the concept of algorithms and flowcharts as the boys and girls program on screen ‘mimics’ of real life situations. Year 3 jumped straight in with the traffic light mimic (red, red and amber, green etc), before trying their hand at the ‘Horse’ with coin slot detector and reversible motors.

On SCRATCH they began working through a series of tasks which can be continued in school, tasks which begin to explore different facets of SCRATCH and its on-screen sprites.

Earlier in the day, Year 6 and 4 continued their 3D modelling and their creation of a ‘skate park’l This included use of SketchUp’s ‘follow-me’ tool allowing the creation of elaborate curved structures, and the creation of customised ‘textures’ allowing the application of ‘graffiti’ - the main focus of their topic in school.

All in all the end of a productive two days at school which has left a legacy of new skills and challenges which can be continued after the computer bus has gone.