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 Creativity Contest Entry By Heather Peirce, Glencoe-Silver Lake Public School
Read the story-WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by Maurice Sendak. After the story present a team of two with the LEGO bricks for them to create their Wild creature. Have students write a description about their Wild creature and present it to the class. The class would then vote for their favorite creature which would be featured in the classroom newsletter.
Lesson Learned: The students will be able to use their imagination and create their own Wild creature using the LEGO bricks. They will recall what they heard in the story and work as a team to create a wild creature. They would work on their writing skills when describing their creature they created.
LEGO Smart Creativity Contest Entry (JUNE WINNER!)By Kacey Weiss, Helix Charter High School
Place a blank sheet of paper in front of each student (this is their place mat.) Then place a handful of LEGO bricks in front of each student. Tell students they have 5 minutes to create a masterpiece. After the 5 minutes is up, ask students to title their masterpiece and write the title on the placemat. Then tell them they have 2 minutes to "change" one thing about their piece. Have them write down on their paper how this improved the overall appearance of the piece. Then tell them to "move" a LEGO brick or cluster bricks. (one minute). Write down the change. Now give them one minute to "remove" a LEGO brick or cluster of bricks. Write down the change. Next have students explain to their partner the process of building a masterpiece. Connect this to the art of drafting a paper (moving pieces, removing pieces, changing pieces). Note that we never took the whole masterpiece apart; we simply made it nicer.
Lesson Learned: Students will learn how to revise an essay and the difference between "re-doing" and "revising."
LEGO Smart Creativity Contest Entry By Kirsten Konopaski, Bay Path Regional Vocational Technical High School
Work in teams of two. Take the LEGO Smart Kit and create something…anything! You should use at least 10 of the pieces. Try to build something that is meaningful. Give it a name. Using Carnegie & Mellon University’s Alice software environment to create your object using other objects that Alice provides. Your model should represent each individual LEGO element that makes up your creation. Your object should be scaled to size for each individual LEGO element that makes up your creation. Your object should represent the color of each individual LEGO element that makes up your creation. Create a method to rotate your object vertically and horizontally in 3D space. Create a method that changes the color of your entire object to one solid color.
Lesson Learned: Teamwork, 3D Modeling with Animation, Object Oriented Software Design
Materials: 20 piece Lego Smart Kit, 1 pair of six sided dice, 24 toothpicks or tacks, scratch paper and a pencil
Setup: Turn each LEGO brick upside down. In teams of two, make sure that each player has 12 upside down (circular holes). Line them up left to right in a line. Rules: Take turns rolling the dice. For each roll perform the following calculation and then the binary translation: Determine the sum of the factorial of the two numbers rolled on the dice. Convert that decimal number to binary. Example: roll dice & get (6 & 2) Answer is: 6! + 2! = 722 (in decimal) Converted is: 1011010010 (in binary) Represent the binary number by placing the tack or toothpick into each hole that represents a ‘1’ and leaving it empty when it represents a ‘0’. The fastest correct answer wins.
Lesson Learned: math skills
LEGO Smart Creativity Contest Entry By Gail Chapman, Luella High School
Tell the students that today they will be making a catapult! Ask them to take out ond 2x4, two 2x2, both 2x6, the 1x6, the 1x4, the 2x8, both flat 2x4s, the flat 4x4 and the flat 2x6 LEGO bricks from their LEGO Smart Kits (then promptly take a breather). To begin, ask the students to take the 1x8 and the 2x6 bricks and line them up long ways with a quarter of the 1x8 being in the middle (the rest being open space). Using one of the 4x2 bricks, connect all three of the pieces together on the bottom; using the 1x6 brick to connect them on the top. Tell the students that this is the launcher. Connect one of the 2x2 bricks to the center bottom of the launcher. Now connect the flat 2x6 to a quarter of the far end of the launcher (the 2x8 end). On top of the remaining spaces of the flat 2x6 add a 2x2 first followed by the 2x4. Finally connect the 1x4 to either end of the flat 4x4; tell the students "that it is your launch pad!" Now comes the fun. Instruct the students to pull out the small pink block from the kit and tell them to place it on the launch pad (that is their ammunition). Now tell the students to make guesses as to where the best place for the launch pad would be along the arm of the launcher. Then let them experiment and learn for themselves (make sure to tell them not to aim at any other students!). Close the lesson with an explanation of torque and the students will never forget this fun physics concept.
Lesson Learned: Students will learn about torque and how it relates to arm length with the use of a Lego catapult. It will introduce students to the idea that there are certain physical properties that govern how the world functions.