Students in our grade 8 and 9 Creative Computing option are wrapping up their Physical Computing unit with the design and creation of their kinetic sculptures, or Automata. Automata refers to self-propelled computing devices that follow set commands from a programmer.

Students began by brainstorming a variety of solutions to the “Creative Computing Challenge” and adding these to their ideation table. From here, students formed groups and came to a consensus idea for their builds and created a technical drawing of the final product annotated with the different features and computing hardware. Students had to consider the User Experience of the audience and how the audience would participate or interact with the machine.

Students then used Microbits and Hummingbird components to build, code and test their Automata.