To inspire students’ love for scientific practice, cultivate innovative thinking and traffic safety awareness, our school’s fourth grade conducted a scientific practice activity titled “Traffic Light Simulation Competition.” The students transformed into “little engineers,” experiencing the entire process of scientific exploration from circuit design to model making, delivering impressive results through wisdom and collaboration!
Combining Scientific Principles with Practice
Students learned about circuit connections, program control, and other knowledge by observing the working principles of real traffic lights. They used open-source hardware (such as Arduino boards) and LED lights to simulate the alternating flashing of traffic lights, understanding scientific principles like digital pin control and delay functions through practice, truly achieving “learning by doing.”
Creative Design Competition
Circuit design: From single-direction traffic lights to multi-intersection coordinated control, students optimized their plans through group discussions and designed scientifically reasonable circuit diagrams.
Appearance production: Using environmentally friendly materials (such as cardboard) to create three-dimensional traffic scenes, some works also incorporated innovative features like “countdown displays” and “solar power supply,” showcasing unlimited imagination.
Team Collaboration and Problem Solving
Faced with challenges such as “light synchronization issues” and “poor circuit connections,” students collaborated, repeatedly debugged, and summarized experiences from failures, ultimately allowing the traffic lights to operate “intelligently.” The activity also set up awards for “Best Design” and “Technology Innovation” to encourage students to pursue excellence.
Showcase of Outstanding Works
By programming, students achieved automatic switching of bidirectional traffic lights, with realistic flashing yellow light warning functions, and the model base simulating a real intersection scene.
Additional features like pedestrian buttons and voice prompts reflect a “people-oriented” traffic design philosophy.
Through simulated practice, students deeply understood the importance of traffic rules and became little ambassadors for “safe travel.” The design process integrated knowledge from various fields such as science, engineering, mathematics, and art, cultivating interdisciplinary thinking among students. This activity also allowed the seeds of the “technology dream” to quietly sprout deep within the students’ hearts.
Editor: Hao Yaokun
Contributors and Photography: Han Jingfang
Review: Yang Lihua
