Parents' Night in the Lego Engineering Classroom

You remember parents' night at school, right? Parents get to go to your classrooms, sit in your desks, listen to your teacher talk about what you'll be doing all year. The Lego Engineering classroom on Wednesday night was a bit different....

Children who had temporarily escaped their parents were clustered around desks taking apart and putting together parts of the partially-assembled cars from Week 2. Parents would occasionally walk in looking lost (as we were not giving any formal presentations...too boring), and given that I speak Spanish and many of the children come from Spanish-speaking households, I would rein them in by asking them if their kids had told them about the class. The lost look would disappear, and they would tell me how much their children had been talking about this class and how the older siblings were jealous that it hadn't been offered when they were in 3rd or 4th grades.

I told them some of the basic principles that their children would be learning about, e.g., how to solve problems by trying things out rather than reading text books and answering questions. One mother was fascinated because her child has been having trouble paying attention in school, and for the first time has become fully engaged in a class (and of course is begging for an NXT kit of his own). She sees the connection between this class and the basic skills he needs to work on, like reading: if he wants to pursue Lego Engineering as a hobby, in the absence of a teacher or volunteer, he'll need to read instructions, find information on the web about how others have solved problems, etc.). Another family had two younger daughters not yet old enough for the class, and simply wanted to find out what all the excitement was about. They were genuinely grateful to the Google volunteers for their time and effort, and recognized the value of exposing children to alternate forms of learning that they may not have access to at home.

Our first day in the classroom

The first activity was "A Chair for Mr. Bear", where the kids had to build a chair out of LEGO elements that would hold a small stuffed bear and meet a couple of requirements: sturdy enough to survive a drop to the floor and stable enough to not fall over if you gave it a little shove. The main purpose is to introduce the kids to the parts they'll be using and to teach them a bit about how to build strong structures. (Remember the bridge that didn't fall down?)

A little bit about the classroom...

We have a separate group of volunteers assigned to each of the three fifth-grade classes. The classes have about 30 kids each, with the kids working in pairs. The LEGO Engineering sessions are 90 minutes long, right at the end of the school day. Working in pairs seems to be universally regarded as the right choice for this activity:

• There's no way to have 30 LEGO kits and enough room to work.
• Teamwork skills are essential all through life - we may as well start now.
• Three-person groups do not work at all - one kid will always be sidelined.
  

Note that this is not a special choice program: all of the kids in the class participate. Pairs are randomly assigned by drawing labeled craft sticks (a.k.a., tongue depressors) out of a "sorting hat" at the beginning of each session.

Back to building chairs...

One thing that I enjoyed pointing out is that the first two engineering steps (identify the need; research the need) were being done for them: We're telling them that the bears have sore feet and that the solution is to build chairs for them. I also point out that a good engineer who did proper research would probably have come to the conclusion that several sacks of leaves might be a better solution.

We showed the kids several deliberately-flawed chairs and let them go at it. On the first day, we realized that most of the kids had no idea what the different LEGO Technic parts did or how they could connect together. On later days, we had them build some simple structures (PDF, 3 pages) as a warm-up exercise. I'm not really sure that that helped, because we got a lot more "successful" chairs on that first day. Go figure.

Once a couple of pairs had chairs built, we had them come up and present their designs. They were not expecting this! However, they were all excited to present their (emphasis on ownership, here) chairs and describe the cool features. They really liked having us take pictures of their chairs. I built a light tent to take the pictures, and am thrilled at how well it worked.

Here are a few bear chairs.

Note: variations in bear-like characteristics should be expected and are a natural consequence of the bears' origins.

Introductory message...

Google engineers teaching fifth-grader students using LEGO toys?

Ever wonder what Google engineers do for their 20% projects? Well, this one isn't typical...

Back in December of 2008, we invited some folks from Tufts University's Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) to talk about "LEGO Engineering, from Kindergarten to Graduate School" (video). They described how LEGO building toys - especially the NXT - can be used to enhance science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education at all levels. Not only that, but Tufts have a program which they call STOMP (yes, it's an acronym) that brings LEGO Engineering into the classroom. They provide training, curriculum, and a community.

I've wanted to find some way to bring these sorts of educational tools to under-represented communities. I fit in well at Google - we are seriously interested in increasing diversity in engineering-related fields - we need our future engineers to reflect the diversity of the people using our products. Interested? Totally!

The project is described in greater detail here, but the short summary is that small teams of Googlers will spend 90 minutes, once a week, teaching LEGO Engineering at Bishop Elementary School in Sunnyvale (near Highway 101 and Mathilda). We're using the curriculum provided by Tufts, modified to fit our experiences.

We started off, on August 24, by holding a LEGO Engineering Conference to get the teachers and volunteers familiar with the program. The next step is to for the volunteers to actually start teaching in the classroom. That will be another blog post. And another. And another...