The Science Temple

This is a guest blog by MIT App Inventor Master Trainer Xiangqun Chen.

Every year we have two Disciplines Festivals; the autumn term is Art Festival, the spring term is Science Festival. So this term is Science Festival. The junior and senior parts of our school have different activities. In the junior part, one of the activities of the Science Festival is a "Science Temple", a gathering of all students to take part in a lot of interesting games within half a day.

Of course our computer science discipline is one of the most attractive areas! The students lined up for playing games.

So happy to play the fruit piano!

Our robotic club designed some interesting games to attract their classmates to play.

The spinwin: Using Arduino robot kits. When you press the green button, the spinwin begins to whirl, then you press the red button, the spinwin whirls down slowly, and finally stops in an area which indicates the game you should play: Tank, Elephant, Fruit Piano, Stamp and Try again.

Touch the fruit to play a note, create your own song!

Lego Tank: You have only 60 seconds to push four items into a goal. If you push one item into a goal, you can get one stamp on your game card, and so on.

Lego Elephant: Make the elephant to roll up a candy stick then put it into the blue fence. If you succeed, you can get a stamp on your card.

Students use apps installed on the smart phone to control the LEGO Robots. The apps are written by our robotic club members, using the App Inventor Platform. But the edition is a bit different from the official one. We cooperate with Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology to develop a local server edition, and add LEGO EV3 and Arduino components in the designer.

Blocks of Tank:

So exciting to know that the new release of App Inventor coming soon will also add Components to support LEGO EV3 Robots. I'll ask my students to test it. They will love it!