Plants on the Move

CyclopsJnr finished his last session at Coding Club today having built and published two different games.  He was delighted with what he built.

He and Cyclops went for lunch at the Botanics afterwards, then did a couple of Science Festival activities there.  

The first was "Frankenstein Plants", which involved creating a species identification sheet for a "newly discovered" plant based on a "specimen" assembled from dried flowers and leaves.  You had a very official form to name it on, complete with a rubber stamp, a barcode and an electronic scanning process at the end to register your "discovery".  We learned about formal names for plant (genus and species) and describing different features.

Next we went on the "Plants on the Move" trail which took us round a selection of plants and looked at how the spread.  Here we are with the Pheasant's Daffodils (Narcissus Poeticus) which was the first station, learning about how bulbs split underground to spread the flowers.  CyclopsJnr had his hood up as there were a few spots of drizzle, but right after this picture it started hailing - hard.  Not the round hailstones we usually get but strange squarish ones!

We completed the rest of the trail then retreated to the other cafe for some cake and to write up the findings in our pamphlet.  On showing this CyclopsJnr was awarded a celebratory chocolate bar.  We also got to see Maggie the Magpie's egg pictured - this was the character that helped us in our exploration.

We went home to play his newly created games, and some Crash Team Racing, before dinner.