National Instruments (News - Alert) (NI) and Lego Education said they are continuing their educational robotics collaboration with the new Lego Education WeDo classroom robotics platform, a drag-and-drop icon based environment.

 

Unveiled this year in June, Lego Education WeDo makes it possible for primary school students seven to 11 years of age to build and program their own solutions. Students learn basic programming skills while designing their robotics applications with WeDo software, according to Lego Education.

 

Powered by NI LabView graphical design software, it is built to cover a wide range of curriculum areas. These areas include language and literacy that has narrative and journalistic writing, storytelling, interviewing, and interpreting; mathematics covers measuring time and distance, adding, multiplying, estimating, using variables; technology includes programming, using software media, and creating a working model.

 

Also, LEGO Education WeDo Robotics encourages teachers to issue curriculum-based challenges for students to solve. Officials said working in teams, children invent their own solution by building a LEGO model and programming it to perform a certain task.

 

Students are encouraged to use creativity, teamwork and problem solving, which are crucial skills needed to compete in the global marketplace, according to officials.

 

“The LEGO Group and National Instruments share a vision of inspiring design and creativity in children through hands-on, interactive learning,” said Ray Almgren, vice president of academic relations at National Instruments. 

 

He also said that through the joint development of LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT and now LEGO Education WeDo Robotics, they are helping build an educational robotics platform that enhances science and engineering education for students in all age groups.

 

“Lego Education is proud to continue our ongoing collaboration with National Instruments to provide students as young as seven years of age with a robotics product that actively involves them in their own learning process and promotes creative thinking, teamwork and problem-solving skills - skills that are essential in the workplace of the 21st century,” said Lars Nyengaard, Director of Innovation at Lego Education.

 

He also said that by combining the intuitive and interactive interface of Lego Education WeDo software with the physical experience of building models out of Lego bricks, they can bridge the physical and virtual worlds.

 

WeDo software operates on the Intel (News - Alert) Classmate PC running Windows XP, the One Laptop per Child XO running the Linux OS, any PC supporting Windows XP or Windows Vista (32bit) and any Mac running Apple (News - Alert) Macintosh 10.5.