Let Go of My Legos:
The eighth-grade Physics by Design class at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass., has a reputation for being downright fun. But most students don’t refer to it by its conventional title, they just call it Lego. That’s right. Lego. You won’t find students here nodding off to sterile terms in a textbook; instead, they’re elbow-deep in bins of colorful plastic bricks building cars and movable robotic arms. And because they’re learning to program whatever they build with the help of Robolab software and a microcomputer embedded in a Lego brick, they really understand the meaning of torque, velocity and momentum.
Having fun is good, but the real key is creating environments where learning is fun, as is the case here. I believe people naturally learn and the largely learn to suppress that desire when subjected to bad formal education as they learn to equate learning with bad experiences.
Related: Middle School Engineers - Engineering Education Advocate - Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology - Building minds by building robots - Lego Learning (June 2006)
