Students at Fernridge School have created a digital light display for Matariki using Raspberry Pi computers. This article shows how the students created the light display, providing a real-life context for exploring how computers work.

Looking out for the nine stars of the Matariki this Māori New Year? Check out this article for tips on how to find the star cluster in the early morning sky.

If you’re getting up early to view Matariki you could be sharing the dawn with some other sky dwellers – moths.

Matariki is a cluster (group) of stars that set during May/June, and rise during June/July annually. The rising of the Matariki star cluster signifies the Māori new year, a time to celebrate new lives, and those who have passed on, with kai (food), waiata (song), and haka (dance), a time for reflection, planning, and coming together as a whānau. Māori tūpuna (ancestors) look to Matariki to time preservation of crops for winter, and to predict the success of the coming year’s harvest.

Words and illustration by Nikki Slade Robinson who turned her book The Little Kiwi’s Matariki into this skit especially for Wild Things readers.

In the cosmology of modern science, Earth is a tiny speck in a vast universe. Our ideas about this topic, then, could be seen as an integral part of how we view our existence on Earth.