WeDo Lego Lab

1c: Leverage CT and CS experts, resources and professional learning networks to continuously improve practice integrating CT across content areas.

4d: Create CS and CT learning environments that value and encourage varied viewpoints, student agency, creativity, engagement, joy and fun.

5a: Evaluate and use CS and CT curricula, resources and tools that account for learner variability to meet the needs of all students.

5b: Empower students to select personally meaningful computational projects.

5c:Use a variety of instructional approaches to help students frame problems in ways that can be represented as computational steps or algorithms to be performed by a computer.

Exploring the Wedsites

Today I explored the website education.lego.com to learn about making legos and creating codes for the robots. My experience with the webisites seemed overwhelming at first, but they are actually very straight forward and easy to understand. Looking through these and reading about the robots made very excited to try out the lab and practice coding myself! There were 2 different wedsites and an app I downloaded in order to prepare for the lab. 

The first website I looked at was to explore the resources. This provided PDFs to read about the Wedo Lego Labs. There were two PDFs I looked at: The Introduction, and the Computation Thinking Teacher guide. 

The Introduction PDF explains what the lego set will do for the students and what they are to do to get the most out of this experience. I also explains ways to assess with the lab and the best classroom management in order for the lab to run smoothly. 

The Computational Thinking Teacher guide starts with an introduction with what computational thinking is. It goes on to explain how the WeDo Lego Lab is incorporated in the curriculum regarding computational thinking. Lastly, ending the PDF, there are many ways to assess with the lab regarding the student's computational thinking. 

The second website I explored explained the preparation steps to start the lab, and allows me to download the app needed for the coding. 

This step by step is very easy to read and the website is very easy to navigate through. Next would be to start the lab by building the legos and giving them interesting features and movements.

Engaging in the Activity

A classmate and I explored coding with the lego set “Plants and Pollinators” lesson. We discovered what each of the behaviors were and what each code would do. 

After exploring the coding on our own, we came up with an activity using the WeDo 2.0 lego lessons to allow elementary students to explore coding on their own. 

The Activity

When being with the students for a quick mini-lesson, we expect to only have 30 minutes with the students. We are planning on doing about 5-10 minutes of instruction and allowing the rest of the time for the students to learn with the programming.

The students will approach the table that we will have set up, with the robot already built. The robot took about 60 minutes to build, so the students would not have time to do this in their rotation. We will ask them what they think they are looking at, which is a flower and a bug of some sort. Then we will ask them what they think is going to happen after they code the robot. By doing this, we are allowing the students to make observations about what they are first seeing. 

After listening to the students, we will allow the students to start messing with the coding. The original code is listed in the instructions, so we will let them pull the same codes from the bottom to match the code that is given. The code should look like this…

Then, we will allow the students to try new functions to see what they will be able to make the robot do. Possibly change the direction of the bugs’ flight, allow them to change the color of the light, change the speeds of the bug, manipulate the music, and how to make the bug continue to fly. They should look like this…

Once they start getting the hang of coding (and there is enough time), the students will be able to build a new bug out of legos. After putting it back together, they then can program new scenarios for the new pollinator.