Sheffield school becomes first national robotics hub for primary pupils

Abby Billups celebrates Sheffield Girls' Junior School being chosen as the first national robotic s hub for primary school children

Sheffield Girls’ Junior School received the accolade of UK World Educational Robotics (WER) Primary Hub after incorporating robotics, and robotic programming, into the curriculum, and helping other Sheffield pupils enjoy the topic.

The school also secured £5,000 worth of funding to buy educational robotics kits following a bid to Girls Day School Trust (GDST) and HSBC Partnership Funding.

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Abby Billups , Maya Gupta and Tiffany Kuoh celebrate Sheffield Girls' Junior School being chosen as the first national robotic s hub for primary school children

Science teacher Lucy Williams, who helped lead the funding bid, designed and introduced WER robotics lessons into the Year 5 science and computing curriculum with the help of fellow teacher Dawn Pooley.

She said: “We have also designed lessons, planning and resources for local primary schools and so far we have delivered the lessons to Year 5 pupils at Ecclesall Primary School and after Easter, we will be working with Nether Green Junior School.

“Children can learn endless skills through robotics from problem solving and creativity, to resilience and communication. The robots are programmed using block coding and in C programming language and don’t come with instructions so the pupils really have to experiment and use trial and error to get the robots to do the things they want them to do.

“As well as our own pupils, the 19 kits bought from the bid money has allowed us to go into primary schools to teach robotics. We want to get children across Sheffield learning about robotics from a young age and also competing in the WER Challenge which takes place annually, with the final taking place in China.”

In May, Sheffield Girls’ will host the first UK WER regional final, where they will compete against teams from Ecclesall, Totley Primary, Tinsley, Dronfield, in the 2020 WER Challenge to gain their place in the European Final.

Dr Melissa Butt, chair of WER UK, said: “The impact that the Sheffield Girls’ WER UK Primary Hub has already had on local primary schools in a short period of time is incredible. Long term, collaborations between Sheffield Girls’, WER UK and Twinkl will enable many other UK schools to incorporate educational robotics into their curriculum and up-skill their learners for the jobs of the future.”