Year 4 Create Mindfulness Timers Using Micro-Bits in Design Technology

For Design and Technology this term in Year 4, our task was to create a mindfulness timer. Our brief, following a very important letter from Mrs Duffy was as follows:

• It had to be on a micro-bit
• It had to only last 30 seconds
• It had to appeal to children
• It had to have a case to put the mindfulness timer in

We started our project by exploring what the term mindfulness is and how this could be achieved. We took part in a short breathing exercise to experience what a mindfulness moment would be like so we knew what we were trying to achieve.

In our next lesson, we were sent a letter from Mrs Duffy about our design brief. She was looking for a mindfulness timer that she could take with her for new school children and gave us strict instructions to follow. We then got creative and designed our own logos for our cases remembering that they had to appeal to children.

In the following lesson, we went to the computing room and got to explore coding and applying these to the micro-bits. We recapped our previous knowledge of using Scratch to create a program before having a go ourselves to build one for the mindfulness timer. We programmed our timer to count backwards from 30 seconds by pressing the A button and also added a reset program by pressing B which cleared the timer. Once tested on Scratch, we downloaded the programmes onto the micro-bit to see how it would look. 

In our last lesson, we created our cases by drawing our logos onto a net and then cutting out, folding and glueing to create a case for our micro-bit timers. We then put our mindfulness timers inside our cases to see how they looked. We were very happy with the results and had a mindfulness moment all together to celebrate our hard work over this week. 

Lastly, we reflected on and completed some evaluation of the whole process of creating a mindfulness timer. We discussed what were the most interesting parts or what was the most challenging part of the whole process. 

Well done Year 4! Mrs Duffy will be so happy with her products! What was your favourite part of our lessons this week?