Somewhere, there’s a kid working on that very project right now. (I don’t know about you folks, but I’d rather have a Lego self-driving car than a Google one. The big difference with Tetrix: the pieces are metal. Lego Tetrix, for example, is fully compatible with Lego Technic (the line of Legos that includes rods, wheels and more moveable parts) and with the Mindstorms controller. Indeed, Lego’s robotics programs extend well into college now. While the skills learned in this challenge echo the sorts of things necessary for other robotics competitions, there’s a social element here that, according to Andy Bell, LEGO Education’s Director of Innovation and Alliances, may help get more girls interested in engineering and robotics.Īll this effort at getting younger users to learn programming doesn’t mean that Lego is forgetting older students. At the ISTE conference last week, I watched a demo of Lego’s Green City Challenge, a programming kit that asks you to build robots for environmental good, not just as battle-bots. Rethinking Robotics Education (Rethinking Legos)īut Lego is also investigating other programs and projects to help challenge some of the stereotypes about robotics. The activities around the WeDo encourage just that thing – and not just with the building of models but with the programming component as well.Īll of this makes WeDo seem a lot less “robotics” and a lot more, well, “Lego.” The comfort level most of us have around Lego could be key to getting more students (and teachers) interested in science, technology, and engineering. This makes the kits not just easy for elementary-age kids to use, but for teachers with limited programming or engineering knowledge.īut this is Lego we’re talking about, and although every Lego kit comes with the designs for various models, the fun really begins when you start to design and build your own creations. The basic WeDo kit comes with a guide for building 12 different robots, each of them teaching a basic building concept. (In fact, you can actually use Scratch to run your WeDo robots too.) By dragging-and-dropping commands together, students are able to easily program their creations. That hub lets students design creations that can, in turn, be plugged into the accompanying software and automated using a visual programming interface much like Scratch. This set uses the familiar, basic Lego bricks, as well as various gears, cams, and axles, and comes with a motor and two sensors – a tilt sensor and a motion sensor – along with a USB hub. The Lego WeDo set is aimed at elementary school age children. One of Lego’s newest robotics programs goes a long way towards this, in part by starting much earlier than middle-school to introduce programming concepts. Mirroring the rest of the tech world, it’s not just a matter of raising interest it’s also a matter of creating a welcoming and supportive environment. And while robotics programs, such as FIRST Robotics, often have as their mission to expand the interest in science and technology among all youth, it’s still been a challenge to get girls and minorities interested in these programs. Now, it’s true that Lego may be a gender-neutral toy – loved by girls and boys alike, but robotics has often viewed as a particularly male endeavor. These help expand robotics education beyond what was, arguably, the initial target audience: middle-school age boys. We’ve featured Lego Mindstorms previously in our series on tools for teaching kids to code, and Mindstorms is part of Lego’s broader educational efforts.Īlthough Mindstorms kits are available commercially, there are a series of specifically educational tools that the company has developed in conjunction with other organizations, including MIT, Pitsco, and National Instruments. It’s been over a decade since the beloved brick-building toy company Lego introduced Mindstorms, its robotics system designed to help kids learn programming, along with other science, technology, engineering and math concepts.
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