When it comes out later this year, the most creative new set of Lego bricks won’t be available in stores or from any traditional retailer. The only place you’ll be able to find it is in a classroom.
Lego Education Science is a new science-focused Lego set and educational tool from the venerable toymaker, with its signature bricks playing the literal building blocks of hands-on science experiments and lessons. Designed for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, Lego Education Science is an attempt to engage children in science through building with Lego bricks, along with guided lessons exploring dozens of scientific concepts.
Scheduled for release this summer, the kits are the latest product from Lego Education, a school-focused arm of the company that has been producing educational playsets for 45 years. Its kits are used in public schools across the country, including those in New York City’s Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Chicago Public Schools.
[Photo: Lego]
Lego Education Science is the company’s first attempt at creating a standalone teaching tool. Sets of the past have been more supplemental to existing curriculaan extra learning aide for after-school programs or as part of a science or robotics club. Not every kid gets to go to an after-school program or an enrichment club. For us, that started to feel like a very, very big opportunity to make even more impact, and certainly to reach a much more diverse group of kids, says Andrew Sliwinski, Lego Education VP and head of product experience.
[Photo: Lego]
Lego Education’s Science kits include more than 120 differentiated lessons across three grade ranges that can be explored using just the material in the box. Building with Lego is a central part of each lesson, but it’s also a gateway for making sometimes difficult scientific concepts easierand more funto grasp.
What we’re trying to do is figure out a way where we can make science engaging, creative, and collaborative, but oh yeah, make that fit in a 45-minute lesson in a classroom with a teacher that doesn’t have a background in science, says Sliwinski. It’s quite the design brief to make that work.
[Photo: Lego]
Each lesson involves building something with Lego pieces, then using what was built to explore a specific scientific concept or phenomenon, from momentum to structural stability to biomorphology. The kits are designed to be used in groups of four students, with an online component that teachers use to guide a lesson plan, which typically starts with a playful scenario or storyline and often features a familiar Lego minifigure.
One lesson about earthquakes, intended for students ranging from third through fifth grades, is called Lemonade Shake, and involves a Lego character with a lemonade stand. The students put the lemonade stand on a shake table and connect it to a small motor included in the kit. When the motor is turned on, the lemonade glasses tumbles to the ground. The students then attempt to design and build their own lemonade stand that could better withstand the seismic force of another earthquake.
Ruthie Chen Ousley is Lego Education’s head of product for the science category, and a former elementary school teacher, and she says the familiarity of building with Lego helps students open up to scientific lessons that some might otherwise balk at. What we find is that it’s really the combination of the different design choices that we’ve made that unlocks this level of engagement, from the storyline in the beginning that invites everybody in to think about this character and the immediate connection to the minifigure character that children have, to the array of Lego building elements and materials that they’re able to play with, Ousley says.
[Photo: Lego]
Sliwinski says developing Lego Education Science took more than five years. Lessons are aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, the state and national standards used to normalize science curricula. In creating the tool, Lego Education integrated feedback from more than 150 teachers, and had hands-on testing by more than 3,000 students, which proved invaluable in the design process. You have to cater for a really wide rnge developmentally, Sliwinski says. What a five-year-old can do and what a 14-year-old can do are different, even down to physical hand and finger strength. So we had to think about all of those details.
The designers also had to contend with the reality that most kids already think of Lego as a toy. Sliwinski says it was important that the Lego Education Science kits weren’t just perceived to be toysor worse, to be seen as toys trying to hide the fact that they are schoolwork. We should never make chocolate-covered broccoli. The worst thing that we can do, I think, is try to take an educational idea, wrap it in a candy shell and try to get the kid to swallow it, Sliwinski says. What we really have to do is think about why should a kid be excited about this, why should a child think that this is interesting to them.
The goal of the kits, Sliwinski says, is to make science more approachable to young children, and to see themselves when they hear the word scientist. That’s not about just making science fun, he says. That’s about making science relevant more than anything else.
