After months of hard work, the Harton Primary Puzzlers took part in the South Tyneside First Lego League competition – with OpenZone in The Word. This year’s task was to identify a problem in our local area and design a solution to fix it. We designed at solar powered tram that would travel from the The Word down King Street to the sea front. We thought this idea would: Make the sea front more accessible to people who could not walk that distance.
We presented this idea as a new report, with Caitlin and Sophie as hosts and Ruby as the weather girl, and the rest of the Puzzlers being all the experts we spoke to – including a solar panel scientist; a tram engineer from Beamish; a PhD student from Northumbria University; a Nexus worker; and a member of the South Tyneside 365 rejuvenation scheme. The Puzzlers spend the day talking to other teams, finding out about their ideas, helping with robot tasks, practicing their robot challenge and just having a great time! They also had to compete in a robot game; a 2 and half minute challenge to complete as many tasks as possible to score the most points, with 4 highest scoring teams got into the Semi-finals. The Puzzlers came 3rd in the knock-outs with 215 points. When competing in the Semi finals, they scored 225 – securing their spot in 2nd to progress to the finals. Competing against Oakwood, who were unbelievably talented at the robot game. They set a heavy lead with 300 points in their first of 3 rounds – securing their trophy in the robot game – but the Puzzlers fought in every round, scoring their highest score of the day of 245 points.
The trophy ceremony gave the Puzzlers 2 reasons to celebrate! Their robot – Athena, God of Technology – won ‘Best Robot Design’, after being referred to as ‘a beast’ by the judges. After coming 2nd in both the presentation and robot game, and 1st in the robot design, the Puzzlers won the overall day – for a 2nd year running – and now have to compete in Bristol in the national competition!
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On Tuesday we had a visit from Mark from the South Shields 365, who are renovating the town - including building the Word and the new interchange.
We talked about our idea to install the tram going from the marketplace down King Street and Ocean Road to the sea front. He liked this idea because it links 2 of the new improvements on the town (the Word and Interchange) and said that is was a good idea, because there aren't any transport links from the ferry to the sea front. Mark also confirmed our questions that there is old tram lines under the road and paths to the sea front - as he had to cut through them to put in the new bollards next to Morrisons. While these tracks would not be ideal for our tram, he said the foundations there are build on would prove very useful to us. When looking through our photos of the walk down street, he helped us to identify problems that we did not notice before - including the phone boxes and advertisement signs near the bridge. This was helpful to confirm our idea and help with identifying more issues we would have to face. By Sophie and Lilly
On Monday the 7th of October, the Harton Primary Puzzlers went on a trip around South Shields.We started the day by getting on a taxi to Haven point then we received our clipboards and pencils. On our clipboard we had a map and a sheet where we would record the good things and bad things about installing trams into South Shields. We then walked to Marine Park, where we recorded information about South Shields and the positive and negative things about Marine Park and how easy it would be to insert trams around this area. After a while, we found the bandstand and thought it would be a perfect place to install trams nearby (as lots of people like going to the bandstand/Marine Park). We then visited Ocean road and thought that the road was wide enough to install a bike path for bikes (as we do not want them to get stuck inside the tracks) and some tram tracks too. There was pleanty of restaurants there so lots of people could catch the tram and go down to Ocean road for some food, plus there was lots of bus stops and we could change them into tram stops. We then went down town and thought that it was also perfect as it was nice and wide. However in contrast, we also found lots of negative notes too. We found out that the road sweeper could stop us from inserting trams and the lampposts too. These negative things could help us improve and with our trip we have found out some problems and hopefully later we will find some solutions too. After walking down King Street, we went to The Word to do some research. We looked at some books about trams, and South Shields’ trams. They had a line going down King Street, that went along the river. We wonder if there are still tram lines under the street? by Daniel and Daniel
This week we are writing questions to ask professionals about our project. These are the professionals we will be visiting/talking to: Nexus - who run public transport in South Tyneside; 365 - who built the Word and new interchange in South Shields; PowerRoll - this is the solar panel company that we are talking to; and Beamish - this is an old fashioned town were the transport is by tram. Also we have a professor from Durham coming in to speak with us. We have asked all these people to help us as our project is a solar powered tram that runs through South Shields and passes past all the most popular places in South Shields to bring more people to the town, as well as provide accessibility to the town and sea front for people who find it difficult to access it. After watching the FLL challenge brief and inspired by the Roman philosophy for designing of "Strong, Useful and Beautiful', we starting thinking of ways to improve our small town - which is currently undergoing renovation, including: attracting more people to the town and sea front; building new homes in old riverfront; and linking the new library (The National Center of the Written Word) to the new interchange and rest of the town. So thinking about these, as well as making our idea more sustainable on the towns resources, we started to mind map ideas that we could do. These ranged from putting a roof onto the marketplace (to protect against weather) to building a science museum with roof garden (for school trips in the local area) to turning all the bicycle lanes in the town into solar panel (providing power to town over large surface areas). Safe to say we were very excited about the brief, but had trouble narrowing it down to just one idea. |
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