![]() Lego has a branch called "Lego Education" which I have come to love. You can get complete sets, with teacher manuals, lessons plans and a variety of activities. It even makes teaching Lego engineering and physics easy for a Non-Brickmaster like myself. If your child has any interest in Lego's I would suggest you check out how you can use Lego in your educational journey. Even if you don't buy Lego Education sets, there are a lot of free activities online as well as our posts here. Happy Building!!! |
Lego Education
Street Sweeper
![]() Today's challenge was to help Jack and Jill clean up the park. They had a cart and brooms and wanted to have fun doing it, quickly. The Lego Ed kits comes with the full story, build instructions and ideas for making changes. We almost always do the Lego ideas and then Taka will spend an hour or so making his own modifications. By maiing the changes in the drive and driven gears and letting the kiddo's play with each version they really "get" what the differences are in the ratios. I love it when learning is so easy and it's always great fun! Below you will find our little video of the sweeper doing it's job. I also took a few pictures of the story line and "teacher" pages in case someone is wondering what they look like. Happy Building! ![]() ![]() |
Click Clock
Taka' decided it was time to dig back into one of his Lego Education kits. Today he decided to build the Click Clock. It's a gear and weight powered clock. This is a really neat lesson and keeps pretty good time. Enjoy the video and pictures :) |
Field Trip
![]() Taka was able to have a little chat with the Lego Master Builder on site for the event, spent about an hour building and ended the trip by announcing "I'm hungry". It was a great day for Taka and Lego! ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Satellites hurtling through space, Oh My
![]() He also just likes to see his creations on the website :) LOL |
Solar Powered Ferris Wheel
![]() We did some experimentation with the solar cell such as - Covering different amounts of the solar cell to see what changed - Blocking the sun from the solar cell with different materials, shapes and shadows. - Adding different weights to the ferris wheel - We actually let it go until the sun went down just to really see if the sun could power it all afternoon. It did :) We had a lot of fun with this and we're already looking forward to our next Lego experiment! Fun Energy Factoid: Did you know that we can't actually make new energy, we can only transfer it. So in the case of the solar cell we are transferring the energy from the photons into the solar panel into electricity. (This is a very simplified explanation and I encourage you to explore this with your kids at a level suitable to their understanding.) |
Gears, Gears and More Gears
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Today we started a Lego Lesson that I thought would be quick and simple. Of course when have Lego's ever been "quick" in our home? NEVER! Low and behold the lesson was to build 9 variations of gears. It was a great lesson as Taka' solidified his understanding of how gears work, the differences between a Drive Gear and a Driven Gear, as well as ratio's. Between the actual building, math (division, addition and multiplication) to figure out ratio's, recording our observations and "modification" building we burned through 3 hours. Although we missed guitar practice today it was a great lesson and once again Taka has learned a lot from his Lego's :) A few pics of a few materials... ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
The Screw
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Pulley's
![]() This week we are studying Pulley's. We've been using our Lego Education set along with our other pieces to build every type of pulley imaginable. I'm also leading a Pulley lesson with our homeschool group this week so I picked up a few Lego Pulley sets (9614) on the cheap. These "mini-sets" are quite nice for group lessons. This way everyone has the same materials (bricks, colors, etc.) to work with. We will also do 2 experiments with life sized pulleys. Once again, I found a great pulley experiment on COSI's website. I also found Peter Valdivia's website to be of great help in talking about pulley's with Takayiyo. |
Wheels and Axels
![]() Axel #1 was a single solid axel connecting both tires. Axel #2 was a small straight axel, one per tire, connected to the same "beam". Axel #3 had an axel per tire, connected to a drive train. This is a fairly straight forward exercise and would not necessarily need the Lego Education set. If you have a few Lego cars hanging around you could use those instead :) |
Lego Levers
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