Last session we had to create a flow system of an object that uses electricity. There were several items to choose from such as a feress wheel and a variety of others. I chose the traffic lights, pictured here on the left. Each trafic light colour had a different number of which you had to switch on or off and alter the timings for. There were a selection of boxes on the left hand side of the screen in which you selected according to which action you wanted to perform. The diagram began with start, then the the output you wanted on, how long you wanted to delay it for and the another ouput etc. You continued with this process untill you had formed the correct order and then added in the arrows for the system to flow. The lights then corresponded to each other and your own set of traffic lights were created!Overall I did find the whole process pretty tedious, however for the more technically minded this may have been heaps of fun! I just got pretty annoyed with it!! For schools however, it seems like a good way of getting the children to order ceratain things and concentrate hard on producing a technical product.
I agree with you Esther that it would be a very good task for the children to do in school as it would provide some skills that they may not have learnt or developed fully yet. Also I think the reason you got angry with it, is that the choices we had (traffic lights, ferrace wheel etc) were very limited and boring if we had some other more creative then I think you would have enjoyed it more.
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