Lego Mindstorms Education Base Set review

In 1949, Lego began building interlocking plastic bricks, and as a result changed the face of children’s toys. It’s still going strong today, with Lego Harry Potter being one of Christmas 2011’s biggest sellers. Where, though, does Lego fit in when it comes to education? What is the educational value of getting children to connect blocks together? Well Lego’s Mindstorms sets answer both these questions: Lego and education fit just perfectly, and this combination could have huge educational benefits in your school.

It also couldn’t come at a better time, now that the ICT curriculum is under fire for being boring. What Lego has developed is something pupils of all ages will continue to benefit from while remaining excited and stimulated.

Mindstorms is brilliant for many reasons. First, it’s based on a toy with which most children will have had some experience at home. They won’t need to familiarise themselves with it, as they’ll already know how it works. Second, it takes the standard Lego formula and uses it to enable children to learn the principles of both programming and simple robotics.

Mindstorms also successfully fills a gap that many teachers identify when trying to deliver the ICT curriculum; one of control. Control is often a tricky area to teach. It requires either specialist hardware or uses programming software that many children (and most ICT teachers) will find complex and intimidating. With Lego Mindstorms, children can write quite sophisticated programs – but they’ll be unaware that they’re doing it. Using Lego Mindstorms looks and feels like play.

The Lego Mindstorms 9797 NXT education set comprises an intelligent 32-bit control block, three motors, a variety of fiddly little parts and connectors, and a set of sensors. These sensors allow your models to detect colour, light and shade, sound and collisions. You can even use them to control a robot arm to play ball games.

As with all Lego products, the construction quality is high. From the moment you open the box it’s apparent that this isn’t a cheap model-making set: the pieces feel robust and well made, and the kit comes with all the wiring, connectors, sensors and battery packs you’ll need.

Putting together models isn’t a challenge. Even though some of the components can pull off some sophisticated feats, they all snap together in the classic Lego fashion, and even the connections have been designed for fitting easily. The pictorial instructions provided explain what the various bits do and cover some simple projects. Certainly, none of the children that worked with the kit had any problems deciphering the illustrations.

Once you have built a model, there are two ways to program it. The first method is through using some simple menus, a handful of navigation buttons and a small monochrome screen on the front of the control block; all the sensors and functions of the Mindstorms kit can be accessed without ever connecting anything to a computer. This is good for younger children who may struggle to see the connection between what happens on a computer screen and what the device in front of them is doing.

However, to get the most from Mindstorms you need to hook up the control block to a PC via a USB or Bluetooth connection and run Lego’s NXT software. Annoyingly, this isn’t included in the basic set; it has to be purchased separately. However, it’s worth budgeting extra for, since with it you can create quite sophisticated programs on a PC, then download them to the control block for execution.

Programming is simple. Instead of coding, it uses a series of intuitive icons that stand in for each sensor or motor. To write your code, you simply drag and drop them into place. Different colours represent the different functions, with all the usual IF, THEN, REPEAT statements shown visually. By combining conditional statements (if the sensor senses this colour) with actions (move this motor a set amount), you can create some surprisingly complex programs. Children quickly grasp the concepts behind controlling the Lego model, and it isn’t long before they’re doing quite amazing things with their self-built robot.

This enables you and your class to really get into the world of ICT control. Projects can range from simply designing a vehicle that will follow a light or a coloured line, to designing a robot that can find its way out of a maze. Your projects can be simple for younger children, using only one sensor type at a time, or they can be more advanced – there’s scope to do both.

The suggested project in the pack is getting a robot to use all its sensors to play with a ball, locating and manipulating it to score goals. For some children this will be an exciting challenge, and one they won’t find either impossibly difficult or tiresomely easy.

The box itself states that Mindstorms is for ages 8+, and generally we’d concur. We tested the kit with both a Year 3/4 class and a Year 5/6 class. The younger class took longer to get to grips with construction and programming, but they still got plenty out of building and programming their model. The older children came up with more sophisticated ideas and programs, and succeeded in all the tasks they were set.

If you’re dealing with secondary school-aged children, don’t worry; it’s clear that both the complexity of the construction and that of the programming can be adjusted to suit the level of the child; some of the projects you find online will challenge even the more gifted and talented students. And the beauty is that, being Lego, there’s nothing to stop you going off the prescribed Lego plans and devising your own devices and machines. This is certainly a challenge from which older pupils will benefit.

Most of all, one thing is clear. Children love using the kit, and this enjoyment makes them more persistent in finding a solution to any problem that crops up in their path. As teachers, we’re always looking to foster independence and a good approach to problem solving, and Lego Mindstorms can help pupils develop not only ICT or programming skills, but these other qualities as well. It leaves pupils enthused and eager to do more. If you want to respond to Michael Gove and his boring ICT curriculum jibe, then Lego Mindstorms could be just the droid you’re looking for.

How a Year 4 class built their own robot

Lego Mindstorms scales up well to secondary school-aged students, but it has a lot to offer younger children too. As part of our testing, we worked with six Year 4 children, all aged eight or nine and at various academic levels in ICT. Choosing a project from the book supplied with the basic kit, we opted for a robot that could spot obstacles and move out of the way.

We started our project by constructing the robot; it seemed silly to present the children with the completed unit, as then they’d have no input in the finished device. All the students were familiar with Lego, but initially they did find some aspects of the kit difficult to negotiate.

There are some fiddly small pieces, and often finding the required one from the tray can be time-consuming. To add to the confusion, one block was displayed as black in the instruction book when it was actually blue in the pack.

The group worked well to build the project from scratch, and it was particularly pleasing to see them communicate with one another to complete the task.

As teachers we’re often looking for new ways to get children to interact, and Lego Mindstorms worked very well in this regard. In fact, really intelligent conversation was fostered, with children explaining to each other how the various parts fit together.

Once built, we programmed the intelligent brick directly with the instructions to get the robot to avoid obstacles. The children agreed that it worked fairly logically, although a couple of them found the small screen difficult to use.

When the robot was activated and the children’s efforts successful, they were all very pleased.

We then moved to the computer to use the NXT programming language to get our robot to follow new instructions. Even those children at the lowest end of the recommended age for Lego Mindstorms managed to get to grips with it quite quickly. As a class we had already used Flowol and Scratch control software, and this was similar enough to not be scary. Being able to download programs to the robot presents a whole new dimension to the task. At the end of the session, all the children were eager to use the Lego again. They felt they had really achieved something.