Wild Earth: The Zambezi Flood Barrier

As part of our Wild Earth theme, we used Lego Mindstorms NXT to create prototype Zambezi Flood Barriers. The children started off by organising their own roles within their group, created drawn ideas and decided on a final idea together. Once a design had been agreed by each group they attempted to build it from Lego. Whilst this led to some frustration as they tried to work out how to make a stable structure, I tried to stand back and observe as much as possible as most of the class demonstrated a great deal of cooperation, support and problem solving. Once the prototype’s had been created the final task was to make the barrier open and close when the water touched a certain level. All the groups managed this with a little direction however some took it quite a lot further with only suggestions planted in their ears. They created alarms, visual reminders and flashing ‘barrier opening’ warning lights. Below are their prototype structures and links to a few video extracts of their final set-ups:

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3