A Case Study with Wimbledon High School

Who we are…

Wimbledon High School is an independent school for girls aged 4 - 18, offering an inspiring and challenging curriculum, a rich and varied co-curricular programme and a warm community with fun and kindness at its heart. Proud to be a beacon GDST school, they have been educating girls since 1880.

Based in London, Wimbledon High School were looking to use engaging coding and robotic platforms to encourage creative thinking and problem-solving around technology and for more students to pursue STEM subjects.

Rachel Evans, Director of Digital Learning and Innovation shares in her own words, the schools’ experience of using MiRo-E and MiRoCLOUD below.

How we are using MiRo…

Words by Rachel Evans, Director of Innovation

Two MiRo-E robots came to live at Wimbledon High School in 2019 and we are having an exciting time with them. We have named them Bit and Byte and we have used them in school competitions. They have also attended many events where their demo social programme provided a great starting point for discussion about technology and humans. They regularly go to Biology lessons when 'Signs of Life' is the topic. Most recently, during a lesson with Year 9 pupils, we started on robots and ended the discussion on 3D printing human body parts, so they are such a great catalyst for critical thinking and free-ranging discussion.

Since MiRoCLOUD was released during lockdown a group of year 9 students have begun work on coding with the robots. We work in a club, rather than within the curriculum. The girls have made use of some of the teaching materials and found them useful. Our approach is a very discovery-based one, where the group come up with a problem and work out how to solve it with very little assistance from teachers. We have also had a couple of really good video calls where we screen shared and tried out different things and the girls showed me what they had done. For instance, after I mentioned the blue ball we figured out the sensor setting to detect pixel colour.

The Outcome…

MiRoCLOUD has made such a difference! School IT systems and networks made it hard to get the coding interface working in the past; the new web-based system is much easier. The interface is intuitive, and we like the way we can use Blockly then transfer to Python. The group are competent programmers already but the sheer range of sensors and features on MiRo are really pushing them - this all goes far beyond the usual school-level coding apps and programmes.

I do think the latest innovations with MiRoCLOUD are really making the product much easier for schools to use. It moves Miro-E out of the 'developer' space and is more user-friendly for us, with the tech support resources we have available to us and the difficulties of tight school IT security and networking policies.