Are you LEGO® Smart™? Are your students? Being LEGO Smart is more than building with LEGO® bricks. It’s having the ability to work in teams, solve problems, and create solutions. It means understanding key science, technology, engineering, and math concepts – not just on paper, but through demonstration. LEGO Smart students don’t just know it, they DO it. The sets, software, and curriculum designed by LEGO Education harness the power of the LEGO brick and combine to create learning opportunities for students that will help develop the skills needed for a lifetime of creating, solving, and contributing to a global society. Be LEGO Smart – be the future.
LEGO Smart Activity (Does not use LEGO Smart Kit) By Elizabeth Carpenter, Chittenango High School
Prepare: Place about 20 LEGO bricks into a sandwich bag. Avoid using wheels. Do use odd shapes appropriate for age level. Prepare enough bags for one bag for every two to three students.
Activity: Introduce the activity by discussing estimations. Tell the groups they can mass any one LEGO on the digital balance and they must tell you the mass of the entire bag of LEGO bricks. Groups should first decide which LEGO brick might be the "best". Once they have massed the selected brick, they should create a data sheet tabulating all of their LEGO bricks including the masses they estimate for each brick and the total mass of all the LEGO bricks.
Options for activity extension: Have students write a discussion of the technique they used for determining the total mass. Have students calculate percent error. Have students write a discussion of why they were "off" on their measurements. Have students write a discussion of how they could improve the final measurement by massing one more LEGO brick. Have a class contest for the group with the lowest percent error. Build a large LEGO object or use a picture and ask students to write how they could determine the mass of the object from the mass of a smaller object. (Density idea, volume concepts.)
Lesson Learned: Students learn how to problem solve, estimate, tabulate, and communicate as they work in groups to solve an estimation of "mass" problem.