He loved his classes, but wanted to do more work with WeDo outside of class. Every week Liam built a new project, often an animal or a vehicle. Until he started there, we hadn’t even heard of this kit. Liam is in the second level of classes, where they use Lego WeDo 2.0. That has been such a great piece of luck! The weekend classes are tiny, so he gets to work one-on-one with a teacher and push the limits of the project. So we found out that they were also running classes at the local library on Saturday mornings. It booked out within a few hours, and Liam was really sad about missing out. Bricks 4 Kidz began running some after school classes at his school in mid-2021. He has loved Lego for years, and been getting really interested in building and coding his other robots. WeDo 2.0 is available now and is compatible with Apple and Android tablets and smartphones Chromebook support will come later this year.Liam has been using Lego WeDo 2.0 for around 6 months. “We saw a real need for that in elementary schools.” “Over time, we've seen robotics become a way to really drive engagement and have children build their own learning,” Hoot says. The skills these students learn with WeDo and Mindstorm also translate directly into the FIRST Lego League, a school-based competition in which students create programmable robots built from Lego bricks. As they get older, they can upgrade to the slightly more complex Mindstorm platform. Lego's WeDo is among the few endeavors designed with young children in mind. In September, the New York City Department of Education announced an $81M program to bring computer science courses to all of its students by 2025, and Chicago Public Schools wants computer science to become a core subject in its schools. "They can learn the basics of any system that they might build as they progress in their academic career."Ĭomputer programming initiatives in K–12 schools are ramping up nationwide. "It's a way that even very young children can do pretty sophisticated programming," says Leshia Hoot of Lego Education North America. The spinning sequence can also be disrupted and turned into something completely different. By reconfiguring the coding bricks, the buzzing noise can easily be changed to a monkey noise or can display a pre-selected image on the device sending instructions. The bee can be programmed with the coding interface to spin around a flower and play a pre-programmed buzzing noise when it completes its cycle.īut like all Lego instructions, these are open-ended and can be modified at will. But WeDo also includes more than 40 hours of lesson plans and activities that conform to 21st-century learning standards.įollowing the provided instructions for one lesson, WeDo can be built into shapes resembling a bee and a flower. The hardware and interface are intuitive enough for students in second through fourth grades. That's an inherent component of the Lego system, and we wanted to mirror that in the programming software," says Pamela Scifers of Lego Education North America. "Lego has a low entry point and a high ceiling, going as far as your imagination can take you. A Bluetooth-enabled component called the Smarthub can receive programming instructions sent from devices such as smartphones and tablets running Lego's intuitive drag-and-drop coding app that uses the hub’s motor and motion and tilt sensors. Lego Education's latest entry in the classroom leverages its popular brand of building bricks with a STEM-based curriculum and loads of personality.Īt CES 2016, Lego Education unveiled WeDo 2.0, a curriculum package designed to provide elementary school students with a smooth path to practicing STEM concepts, such as engineering, robotics and programming, with fun hands-on lessons.Īs an update to its existing WeDo package, version 2.0 goes wireless, cutting the USB tether of its predecessor. Lego’s WeDo 2.0 has a knack for making students smileĪs they take their first steps into the world of programming.įrank is a social media journalist for the CDW family of technology magazine websites.
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