How was your summer? We spent ours exploring art and science with lots of new friends! Our Public Programs Officer, Kerry Turnbull takes us through the highlights of the 2018 Draw it. Code it. | QUT Summer Holiday Program at The Cube.
What a blast January was! We were thrilled to welcome over 5,000 visitors to The Cube from 6 to 14 January during the summer holiday break. Families, eager to break the school holiday boredom blues, brought along children excited to engage in the range of hands-on activities on offer at The Cube and QUT Art Museum.
While art and science are sometimes considered unlikely allies, the Draw it. Code it. QUT Summer Holiday Program celebrated the fusion of the two, exploring how art and science can complement one another.
Scope TV science presenter Lee Constable joined us on Saturday 6 January for the jam-packed Family Fun Day program launch. The day included Fast Five: Chats with Lee Constable, which gathered tech and art gurus like Professor Michael Milford from Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, design expert and gamification researcher Dr. Zac Fitz-Walter, Dead Puppet Society Artistic Associate Helen Stephens, and Samuel Ashcroft and Lindsay Watt from RAWrobotics. With a curious audience full of budding STEAM stars, kids fired plenty of questions at our experts and even managed to crack a few codes!
The digital Draw it. Code it. Treasure Hunt attracted families keen to get on their feet and explore The Cube and QUT Art Museum, all the while testing their new-found knowledge gained from the holiday program’s activities. Participants posted “trash talk facts”, found shadow puppets at the Art Museum, and located rolling Sphero robots. Having sharpened their problem-solving skills, the biggest challenge was to get back before the game was over to collect the extremely popular Code-A-Bot cardboard cutout!
Code Coach workshops saw our clever public program facilitators transformed into coding mentors. They shared tips and tricks for coding robots on The Cube’s interactive game Code-A-Bot, helping visitors to hone their coding skills, all the while increasing the efficiency of the fictional DERP recycling plant.
Designed by creative coder Steve Berrick, Design-a-bot was a huge hit with younger visitors! The unique activity encourages artistic collaboration by colouring and scanning in a robot to a 3D world. We loved watching little faces light up as their robot joined the virtual space.
We were so excited to reveal the brand new Retro Arcade games, Mighty Pucks and Track Stars! It was great seeing parents and children alike playing with these 1980’s style arcade games. If you missed out on the big reveal, don’t worry The Retro Arcade games are on display on screen 5 of The Cube daily.
We also had a lot of fun fusing art and science at The Maker Space. The room was brimming with young innovators tinkering with creative learning tools Makey Makey and littleBits. Pepper, the social robot even made a special guest appearance!
Plus, this proved to be a great space in which to make a character for the Design a Character Competition. We loved how creative the entries were! But there were two stand out entries for us, we hope Sam and Mahjabeen are loving their BB8 Sphero prizes.
With so many activities on offer, this program was a great opportunity to explore art and science, and continue The Cube’s commitment to engage with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics). Thank you to everyone who came along and made the program such a success!
We can’t wait to see what next school holidays have in store! Make sure you’ve signed up to hear from us first!
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