I had the whole day at Wybourn Community Primary last Monday, working with a class of year 4s to make tanglebots. Some other adults joined in too, Joanne Armitage (UofLeeds/ALGOBABEZ), Tanya Fish (Pimoroni, who also contributed tech), Anna Woolman (British Science Association), Ellie Lockley (Sheffield Hallam University) plus teachers including the excellent Julian Wood. It was funded by RCUK via a British Science Association project on reaching young people with science.
It went really well, the kids were really engaged and had no lack of confidence in taking toys apart and rebuild them into tangling monsters. The results are installed in Playground, a free digital arts exhibition for children in the Sheffield Institute of Arts gallery, open next week during the Children’s Media Conference. Here’s what they look like in-situ:
It’ll be interesting to see how long they stay ‘working’ in the exhibition with streams of children coming to see them. I couldn’t really leave them actually tangling things as they of course stop working very quickly when they get in a tangle. But hopefully the twitching and spinning will give the idea.
The tanglebots workshop was developed with FoAM Kernow as part of the Weaving Codes project, in partnership with lovebytes. You can read more about it over here.
