Our technology department is split across two sites. On our Aldwins Road site we cater for our Year 7-13 high school students. In addition to this, we also have another team catering for schools who don't have specialist technology classes in their own kura, so they are bused to our Avonside Drive team for 1.5 hours every week of the year for specialist technology learning.

Rubber Duck Debugging

In term 1, Year 11 Computer Science students have been learning about Python programming, an industry level computer language.

It is often difficult to find your own errors when you have a line of code incorrect, so students have been introduced to the concept of rubber duck debugging. It's helpful to explain your code to another person so you can find what isn't working and then debug it. Instead of using another person (who is likely busy), you can use an inanimate object, such as a rubber duck. Typically as you are reading code to your duck, you realise what the problem is and can correct it. 

Check it out online; it’s a real thing! It’s the nature of explaining code to something/someone that helps you take the time to double-check it.

Year 9: tote bag project

Year 10: weaving project and repurposed clothing project 

Year 11: contemporary kākahu project and comfy clothing project 

In addition to having technology on our High School campus, we also have Technology at our old site on Avonside Drive. There are 23 partnership schools who are bused to us each week for specialist technology classes in Food, Fabrics, Digital Technologies, Robotics, Makerspace, Hard Materials and Product Design. Each term students experience a different curriculum area.

Below are some of the awesome things they have made or learned about at technology.

Makerspace

Fabrics

Robotics

This year in Robotics, we started using the newest Lego robotics kits, Lego Spike. A very streamlined version of the Lego EV3 kits, these kits were not always an improvement on the EV3 kits, but did offer an “up to the minute” Scratch-based programming language which is being widely used in education.

The Lego Spike application offers many cool robot build instructions which students love to explore. Build a robot hand, an electronic safe, a line following robot, a pedometer or a weather-forecasting robot, for example.

Hard Materials

Digital Technologies

Food

Year 7 develop a low-sugar breakfast for a stakeholder of their choice.

Year 8 make a snack food suitable for a school market day.