Last Day Letter for Lego WeDo and Mindstorms

Computer Lego Robotics
Summer Wonders
Summer 2008 Grayslake Dear Parents, These two weeks have been a wonderful adventure for me. I have never seen such creativity with Lego WeDo! The students learned the basic concepts within the first two days and were working independently by the third day. There were 12 basic machines in the directions that accompanied the kits and most of the children made many of them. Some children even preferred making their own machines and programs, which showed their ability to acquire and extrapolate information.

I like teaching the kids programming at this age, because it teaches them so much about computers. Are the cables connected? What is your program telling the machine to do? What do we need to do to get that result?

There are not a lot of web resources for the Lego WeDo yet. The Lego web site has instructions for using WeDo with the programming language Scratch, which you can download for free at Scratch. A Scratch Wiki is available where students and teachers can add their ideas. A printable handout for activities involving both Scratch and WeDo is also available. A blog which provides more WeDo designs is WeDoBots. Don’t forget to check out Geek Dad’s Blog, too.

I will put up this material on my web page at www.dwna.net in addition to the material I have up there now, so please check back from time to time. If you care to email me, I’m at lwallin at dwna.net, or choirmemberil at gmail.com, which I don’t check as often. I will also give a DVD to the Center for Gifted of all the pictures and videos we made. I am including the resource page I made for Mindstorms, which is the program used by third grade and up.