Lego in Education

Lego in Education

I must admit I am a big fan of Lego and I am blessed to have a daughter who provides an excuse to buy far more plastic bricks that any child could really need…but I am also a professional educator and this does not alter my opinion of the benefits that Lego Education can offer. Honest.

My Lego Background

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of building Lego, particularly the Space and Castle themes. Back then the bricks were rather simple, though Technic could offer some interesting builds and there were already Lego train sets (where you had to build the tracks - a lot more work than today’s track system!).

Today’s toys come in a wide range of themes and India and I have a large collection of Star Wars and City Lego, the latter including many, many aeroplanes and an extensive train set. Much of this owes its existence to Covid - when Botswana went into lockdown in March 2020 most people rushed to buy toilet rolls. I bought a football, tennis balls, and enough Lego to last a year!

The IST team 2003 - with their trophies!

My Educational Lego

In 2003 I started work in a brand new IB school in southern Norway. One of my initial jobs was to teach technology (alongside Maths and PE). As part of this the school had bought several Lego Mindstorm sets - and these were used to teach basic programming. This was most effective when we entered the First Lego League challenge that year. Students had to come up with solutions to improve disabled access in our school and then build and programme a robot to overcome ten challenges that a disabled person might come across - though the only one that I remember is the basketball challenge. The kids had a lot of fun, but needed a lot of help too - it was worth it to get the custom built Lego trophies!

Frankie the farting cat - what more could a five year old want!

Lego Robots for Young Children

It was another 15 years before I had a chance to play with a Lego robot. This came when I bought my daughter the Lego BOOST Creative toolbox - https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/boost-creative-toolbox-17101. This is a set that makes 5 different programmable things - a robot, a cat, a guitar, etc. Each build comes with simple programming challenges using the simple BOOST drag and drop system on a tablet/phone/laptop. These keep the builder interested as the design comes together.

Needless to say being able to program a cat with a range of farting noises when you tip it upside down gave my daughter hours of fun.

Six pieces but millions of combinations ensure that each duck the workshop participants was unique.

Today’s Educational Lego - Cape Town Workshop

In May 2022, I was lucky enough to attend the InnovateEDU event in Cape Town. While the other three sessions were interesting, it was the Lego one that stood out. Why?


Teaching Technology effectively requires educators to realise that tech is a tool. Like any tool students will only learn to use it effectively by actually designing and completing a final product. You do not learn how to use a hammer by hammering a thousand nails, but by using that skill to build something.


Too often we teach IT skills as a stand alone business - I have seen IT lessons where students have been taught word-processing skills by modifying a piece written by someone else. Who can think of anything more boring - or less likely to develop carry over skills? We learn best when we have an active need for a skill that we have a real and immediate use for.

The basic robots that we then added the various sensors to.

The workshop started with a miniature Lego set - a 6 piece duck with no instructions. Asked to build a duck, each of the 20 people in the room came up with their own design. An immediate insight into how creative we are - and how often we destroy that creativity by focusing on the ‘correct solution’. Instead of providing step by step instructions that stop students thinking, we immediately hit upon an iterative design cycle, where we analysed, designed, built, evaluated, and then improved our ducks, going through the whole process again.


We were then given a box of the latest iteration of Lego Education’s robotic system - the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Prime Set. This hefty box sells for an equally hefty $359.99 USD - see https://education.lego.com/en-us/products/lego-education-spike-prime-set/45678#spike%E2%84%A2-prime . This set includes a large motor, two medium motors, a distance sensor, a colour sensor and a pressure sensor. These are all connected via a control hub and they all fit into the standard Lego building system.

Working in pairs, we were then given a series of tasks - with just enough instructions to get you started without taking away the joy of building and creating. These tasks started with building a simple robot that could move and turn. Once again, the groups built a huge range of unique creations.


Once built we were given a simple task of making it turn 90 degrees - exactly. Then we started introducing the sensors, again with simple tasks such as stopping on a line of a certain colour and then turning 360 degrees, and stopping before an obstacle. These were done through the simple block building coding package that can connect to the robotic hub either through a USB cable or Bluetooth.


Finally we were given a challenge that combined everything we had learnt - we had to combine lines and turns and then retrieve our yellow ducks from the end of a table. Many teams came close, but only one succeeded. Modesty would forbid saying whose team it was, but modesty has never been my strong suit. It was mine!

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Drinks anyone? The limit is your imagination - especially when designing challenges.

So why go for LEGO?

What made this session stand out? I had just attended a similar session using a Raspberry Pi style device to programme LED’s to represent traffic lights via a breadboard. It was a good session, given by two brilliant and passionate educators. It covered the same coding concepts as the Lego session, but lacked the fun and the creativity. This meant the coding took a lot longer to learn and without the fun of a physical end product (LED’s do not count!) it was nowhere near as effective. However, the materials used were a tenth of the cost of the LEGO package.


The Lego session on the other hand, was full of genuine creativity and collaboration (something hard on a fiddly breadboard) and 20 teachers learned to code effectively within 90 minutes. The classroom was full of children’s robots that had been designed for all sorts of challenges and tricks - including a soda dispenser. This shows what problem solving can be.

To get the most from the large outlay on equipment it is necessary to have custom built desks or at least large trays that can be fitter to current furniture. This means that pieces will not get lost or be broken when the robot falls! They are also a must for the First Lego League competitions.


It is also essential that the programming and design are built into the curriculum and are not seen as a fun add-on. This requires close cooperation from the Tech and IT departments - and ideally others as the design and programming elements lend themselves to many cross-curricular projects. But they must be planned.


Lego have gone someway to doing this, with a selection of 35 lesson plans linked to the UK National curriculum. These range from designing and building rides for a theme park to capturing real world data for programs. These can be found at https://education.lego.com/en-gb/lessons


While the lesson plans are aimed at the 11-16 (Key Stages 3&4), the programming language can be swapped from drag and drop to Python - making it useful for A Level Computer Science projects.

Summary

Lego is an expensive investment - but the payback is in the speed and effectiveness of the learning experiences. The fact that it is an established brand with a long history makes it a sensible choice, and makes it an easy tool for many children who have had experience. The fact that it links with ‘normal’ Lego bricks means that the design choices are literally endless. There is no other product on the market that covers design, engineering, programming and electronics anywhere near as well.

However, to get the most from it your curriculum planning must be spot on - preferably with a culture of project and cross-curricular work. With that level of investment it cannot afford to be seen solely as part of afternoon clubs and after school activities.


Finally, the opportunity to get involved in real world competitions, such as the excellent First Lego League, gives students a fantastic chance to show off their creativity and problem solving skills.

Time for take off!

A big thank you to my employers, Maru-a-Pula School, for the opportunity to go to the InnovateEDU workshop.