St. Patrick’s English School has incorporated improvements in the field of Information and Communication Technologies into the subject area of the same name, guaranteeing that pupils develop the necessary competences for the current educational and working worlds.
To this end programming and robotics have become part of the established curriculum and pupils now work with the program Arduino and 3D printers.
The former, Arduino, has several advantages: it is a relatively inexpensive microcontroller; it is Open Source and has many enthusiastic followers who share their knowledge on the web; and Scratch and S4A (Scratch for Arduino) are ideal tools to initiate pupils in the world of programming and in the handling of microcontrollers.
3D printers enable pupils to create pieces with which they construct their individual robots. They use the programme Sketchup, intuitive and ideal for the beginner in the creation of objects in three dimensions, and, thereafter, use the printer to produce their creations.
They make their own programmed robots from scratch, transforming an idea into a tangible object, a source of both satisfaction and motivation.