How do you get a bunch of kids excited about learning how to program? Try adding Legos with motors!
Every Monday night for the rest of the summer my son and some of his friends are taking a class on building robots with Legos. How cool is that? They are doing it through a company called Davinci’s Kids. He took the first course last fall and really had a great time with it.
Basically each week they are presented with a challenge. They build a working Lego robot using the LEGO Mindstorms NXT
Last night was week #2 of the course and their mission as part of Alien Encounter was to design a plow for their robot that would push the most rocks across the finish line. Here is a video of my son’s last robot performing the task. One of the wheels got stuck and it ended up making the plow turn.
About 12 years ago I taught the Lego Robotics program to kids in a private school setting. The curriculum is extremely sound and a great way for kids to begin learning the basics of programming in general.
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10 Comments»
Brown Baron
18. July 2007 | 01:42 hLearn while you play .. great concept. My kids would love this.
Robert Hruzek
18. July 2007 | 08:35 hWaaah!!! The didn’t have this when I was a kid! Sometimes I am sooooo jealous of kids these days - they get to play with the coolest toys!
Char
18. July 2007 | 08:42 hBrown Baron - check with your local high schools or parks and rec departments, you may find a similar course for your kids.
Robert - That’s why you have kids - so you can play with all the cool toys they didn’t have when we were younger. Seriously, you should see some of the really wild remote control toys they have out now. My son got a remote control Dragon Fly that is unbelievable. I need to make a video of it flying, too.
Robert Hruzek
18. July 2007 | 08:44 hChar; yep, it’s a drawback of not having kids - no excuse to buy these things!
shaz
18. July 2007 | 10:25 hvery cool!
Terinea Weblog
18. July 2007 | 14:04 hHave you seen MIT’s Scratch website, an excellent way to show kids what programming is about, fun too!
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Jamie
Char
18. July 2007 | 14:14 hTerinea - Scratch looks interesting - I’ll have my son check it out. I know he has used the Lego designer before.
Luana
18. July 2007 | 15:08 hGreat! This is what kids love! PLAY and learn!
Techsplorer
20. July 2007 | 16:17 hCool. My six year old son just finished Extreme LEGOS and MatheMagic offered by our school district community education this morning. Loved it!
They gave us a link to check out: http://www.legoeducation.com that I’ve got open in another tab right now. Really neat stuff!
Matthijs Hofstede
10. January 2008 | 04:40 hGreat! I followed an introduction course on programming while in college. This was the first class. Never seen so much 20 year old play with Lego. Also never seen so much students attend every class off the course.