LEGO Education WeDo 2.0 is one of the best tools for primary school kids who want to learn robotics. See with your own eyes how they come alive thanks to a few simple commands. Isn't programming supposed to rule the world?įortunately, you can use Scratch to program robots built from LEGO bricks. Created programs never go beyond the computer screen, which often weakens the students' enthusiasm. Thanks to this approach, simple programs are created almost organically and each new program becomes an inspiration for the next one.Īlone, Scratch allows you to program only within its interface. They assemble coding blocks and test their ideas, the same way they do when playing and building with bricks. Programming in Scratch is done by connecting colorful blocks that contain programming instructions. SCRATCH WEDO CODEeight-year-olds) can use it to code on their own by creating games, animations, or interactive forms. What is Scratch? It is a visual programming language with text elements, created for educational purposes. Or maybe, you are on the fence about teaching with Scratch?īefore you look at the instructions, read why over 66 millions of users and teachers around the world sing praises of Scratch, and how come connecting colorful blocks develops future-relevant skills. SCRATCH WEDO HOW TOInstructions on how to prepare Scratch for LEGO WeDo are a few lines further down (click!). Although it wasn't always this way, fortunately today, just a few clicks do the trick. This was the framework of the final program that the students did, although most decided to customise with extra sounds and speech bubbles!Ī quick video of some of the final creations.Programming LEGO Education WeDo 2.0 in Scratch 3.0, or connecting two phenomenal tools for learning robotics and programming, is easy as rolling off a log. We did simple programs to open and close the gate based on a keyboard press and then introduced the distance sensor. We ended up with ducks, birds, dogs, hippos, snakes, snails, crabs, chickens and so on…. That permission to be creative resulted in some extremely engaged students and a menagerie of animals. The only restrictions I gave them was “it has to hold an animal” and “I don’t have any animals, so you have to build your own!”. Once that was under control, students set about building their enclosures. We built a simple gate and had a play around with the duration and power levels to see if we could get fine control of the motor and get it to stop in set positions. As usual I played dumb and let the kids discover and teach me which way was clockwise and which way was anti-clockwise (for the record, ‘this way’ is clockwise when looking at the motor from the front.) I started out just showing them how to enable the WeDo blocks within Scratch and then a quick exploration about motors going ‘this way’ as opposed to ‘that way’. While the programming complexity of Scratch is a little higher than the LEGO software, it is still easy enough to use and the grade 3’s were up and running within minutes. The standard programming language that comes with the WeDo kits however is not supported on the XO laptops, so we used Scratch instead. This particular school had a very extensive XO laptop program so they were keen to utlise them as much as possible. 150 students over 3 days, in 2.5hr sessions at a time. I recently ran some workshops for Grade 3 students with the LEGO WeDo kits.
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