Lego WeDo

At great expense, I've bought Lego WeDo to learn about it. You don't get much for your money but having "played" with it and looked at the accompanying resources, I suppose I can understand.

Originally I wrote the following:-

Making the models was fun, even for someone of my advanced years. However, I took some time to get used to the support and programming. It isn't as simple for children as I expected but then do children need it that simple. I now think I've got an understanding of the package and just need to work out how to structure the teaching of it and integrate it into the curriculum.

Having spent one day a week for five weeks working with children, I still think it's great fun and am more enthusiastic about the programming side of things. Indeed, I must not prejudge things - the children had very little trouble with making the models or programming, although we didn't have time to explore the latter in great depth.

I also need to remove the following slide from my presentation:-



Children don't panic. I was putting the adult slant on to the work. Children take it in their stride. It's just the lesson.

In addition, the scope for imaginative modelling, programming and story-telling was obvious from the way children took to the tasks.

Week 4 (most able) ; Modified model, additional programming, original story

Week 5 : Make up your own model and programme it.

I am in the process of investigating how Lego WeDo can work with Scratch, a free text-based programming language. I think there is great scope here and feel I'm a year or two behind where I should be.

And if I could get access to cheap Lego Technics I thnk I'd be linking those models (and Bionicle figures) with the WeDo hardware and software. Could we cross toy boundaries and mix Lego and Knex even?

Off to catch up and maybe progress to Mindstorms EV3.