As part of our expedition ‘To Infinity and Beyond’, Crew Godley have been exploring the incredible journey of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, and discovering how coding played a vital role in making space travel possible.
We began our learning by diving into the world of binary – the language computers use to communicate. The crew were fascinated to learn that everything a computer does is built from just two digits: 0 and 1! Using this knowledge, we had a go at writing our own names in binary code. It was a fun challenge, and we quickly realised just how complex things would be if we had to communicate like this all the time – thankfully, computers do the hard work for us!
Building on this, we moved into practical coding. The children applied their understanding by programming a traffic light sequence, carefully instructing it to change colours in the correct order and at the right time. This helped them to understand how precise and logical instructions need to be when coding – just like the instructions used in real-life space missions.
