Building Bright Young Minds: Lego Robotics for Emerging Engineers
by Grace Bueler, April 1st, 2024
LEGO is an iconic toy. Whether you built a kit on your birthday or acquired large bins stuffed with pieces, it’s rare to come across someone who hasn’t heard of these colourful bricks. Historically accompanied by step-by-step instructions to construct a 3D rendering of an image on a box, Lego has come a long way since its invention in 1932, and this practice now only scratches the surface of what these pieces can do.
Enter Lego Robotics. Launching Lego into the 21st-century with accessible, colourful coding, this activity lets its structures and children’s imaginations run wild. Perhaps what is most impressive about Lego Robotics is its connection to STEM. There are countless articles, studies, and testimonies touting the power of STEM in our tech-forward world, promoting the fun that young people can have learning to code, 3D print, or edit digital files. But why is the “E” in STEM (engineering), so great for young people? It inspires visualization and tangible problem solving, and exercises spatial abilities in a fun, player-driven environment, able to be practiced by taking a robot apart, changing its pieces, and then programming it to dance along to rock music while strumming a guitar.
Let’s build a Lego robot!
A 2020 study published in the journal Science Education International asked Turkish middle school children in a school-run Lego Robotics club to draw what they thought scientists looked like and did. The results were overwhelmingly homogenous: few featured a female scientist while almost all featured white lab coats, laboratories, and other stereotypical imagery, such as scientific equations on a whiteboard, beakers, and goggles. Children don’t always see the science that happens all around them. Men with wild grey hair mixing concoctions is a popular stereotype, but this portrait is limiting, both in who can be scientists and what they actually do.
Christine Cunningham, vice president at the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts and an educational researcher, has experienced similar things when working with young people.
“Children think engineers drive trains,” she told Discover magazine in 2013. As the founding director of Engineering in Elementary, a program bringing engineering programs to classrooms across America, she has also asked children to draw pictures of scientists, more specifically engineers. These usually feature construction workers building roads or bridges. “The kids think engineers build these structures, not design them,” she continues. “If you have no idea what engineers do, then it’s not very likely that you’ll think about this as a career path.”
The open world building of Lego Robotics exposes students to a broader engineering world they can participate in. FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an international non-profit that organises youth Robotics programs, hosts annual robot-building competitions to creatively solve problems in areas young people are familiar with, like responsibly dealing with trash and preserving food. Their 2013 Lego League Challenge asked participants to solve issues faced by the elderly population (a group young people are connected to by their grandparents), inspiring teams to come up with clever solutions, such as a robotic walker fitted with a magnetic tray to keep utensils from falling off.
“Too many high-school kids in this country, particularly women and minorities, drop out of science and math classes,” FIRST’s founder, engineer and inventor of the Segway Dean Kamen told Smithsonian magazine in 2013. “Instead of telling them [kids] why abstract concepts like algebra or trigonometry are important, science teachers should say, ‘Let’s build a Lego robot!’”
When assisting in my own Lego Robotics after school programs, I’ve seen how excited kids are to infuse themselves into their creations. While the kits can be used by following a set of instructions, these invariably give way to customization and exploration of personal interests. One group of girls, eager to make their Lego people band’s stage light up with specific colours and patterns, frantically discussed not only the pieces needed and which sequence to drag and drop their instructions in the kit’s coding program, but also their favourite colours and what kind of music they imagined the band played.
In 2005, teacher Jenny Murphy and curriculum director Kathy Bartelmay at North Carolina’s Duke School published a study in the journal Science and Children on a classroom of second-grade students playing with Lego MINDSTORMS® kits. The researchers noted that the students immediately thought up robots designed to solve challenges they saw at home. homes and issues. One student set out to build a robot that could find his parents’ keys, while another imagined a “Yard-bot 2000,” a machine capable of doing all sorts of yard chores (what’s more child-like than skirting housework?).
And those kids and their drawings? After four weeks of playing with Lego Robotics kits, the students drew pictures of scientists again, showing different results. This time, male scientist depictions decreased from 75% to 52%, the number of older scientists was cut in half, and students’ drawings focused more on the environments of the scientists instead of the scientists themselves. According to the researchers, this reveals a widening of perceptions of who can be a scientist and even a questioning of why physical characteristics of a scientist matter.
Lego Robotics activities for kids award them the power of engineering, and with it, visualisation, things they are eager to wield as they see fit. It can expand their roles in their worlds, teaching them that they can make room for whatever their interests, ideas, and identities are.
“Girls are more into aesthetics, logistical, detail-oriented,” a teenage boy told a reporter at the 2013 FIRST Robotics Competition. He is soon backed up by a teammate: “Guys are into smashing things.”
Overhearing this, a nearby teenage girl from an opposing team interrupts the team’s huddle to assert “You’d be surprised” before returning to her own robot, designed to pick up the same rubber rings and place them onto the same vertical spike as the rest of the teams, in their own way.
revealing endless possibilities across disciplines, teaching children that engineering can be done in their own way.
Beyond Magic
“Engineers, basically, are problem-solvers,” says Leigh Abts of the University of Maryland’s School of Engineering and College of Education.
In our previous post, [hyperlink to chess blog post], we discussed problem solving as one of chess’s major lessons. While the problem solving of chess is mostly psychological, Lego Robotics is all about problem solving for the tangible world, which can more easily be communicated to young people.
“If you introduce engineering concepts and learning in K-12, you keep them thinking creatively and believing that they can solve problems,” Tameica Jones, Ph.D., assistant professor of STEM education at the NC State College of Education claimed in an article for the college’s online newspaper. “If you add math, physics, chemistry, structures and circuits to an idea, it’s beyond ‘magic’.”
Cunningham agrees: “This problem-solving perspective is best taught young because it aligns with how kids learn. Concrete examples that require hands-on solutions mean far more to kids than abstract concepts like prime numbers or fractions.”
Competitiveness often makes its way into my Lego Robotics student programs; where there are cars, there will be racing. Two sets of boys at one Toronto elementary school decided to race the cars they had been building, eager to show off how expertly they could direct it with their coding apps. Once they set off, one team immediately realised their car was veering left instead of going straight and rushed to adjust their coding instructions. Then, when it wouldn’t go fast enough, they returned to their apps to increase the speed. They cheered, jumped up and down, and worked together, excitedly diagnosing and solving their problems seemingly at the speed of light.
The problems of Lego Robotics are tangible, simple, and often immediately relevant to children’s daily lives. In a study conducted in 2013 by two University of Northern Iowa assistant professors, Grade 1, 2, and 3 students from an American midwestern state school’s Lego Robotics club were given two Lego Robotics WeDo 2.0 kits. The researchers observed that the children went much further than simply reproducing the pre-set robots and code, but instead independently engaged in alternative problem-solving through storytelling. One student building a rescue robot for a fictional panda trapped on a cliff came up with a different story for each rescue strategy he’d devised depending on different circumstances. The researchers also observed the children engaging in problem solving with each other: upon realising their race car was moving backwards instead of forwards, one group of students had a conversation that included realising their problem, communicating this problem to each other, attempting to find causes, and finding a solution. Impressively, the students also quickly adopted engineering vocabulary into their conversations, such as “adjustment” and “experiment.”
Another study tracking Lego’s effect on children’s problem solving abilities appeared in the Journal of Positive School Psychology in 2022. Twenty-five 11-year-old students were selected from a group of 1,000 across Tehran schools who had implemented a Lego education program in their 2016/2017 school year and were evaluated before and after their participation. The students received Lego Education packages which contained Lego Robotics kits emphasising humanities and social studies themes. Using Heppner’s Problem-Solving Inventory Test, the researchers found that the program had had a meaningful positive effect on multiple measures, one such being decisiveness. Students more easily and politely said no to demands they disliked and were less likely to infringe on their classmates’ rights to do the same. Self-restraint also increased: the students became better at managing their emotions and making reason-based decisions when facing an issue, allowing them to better adapt to a situation and garner feelings of resilience and stability in problematic situations. The researchers hypothesised that this means the children developed self-management skills with the help of the Lego education’s safe environment, and therefore could more confidently solve problems without fear of judgement.
Cunningham, who engages her students in similarly simple, real-world engineering scenarios, has witnessed the same propensity in her students, claiming that simple exercises are valuable teaching tools for navigating challenges (a natural part of life) through trying, failing, re-thinking, and then trying some more. “The idea that failure is good [...] can be a new experience for students, but it’s how engineering works,” she says. “Flexing these mental muscles and fleshing out these concepts can continue as students progress through the educational system.”
Joan Ferrini-Mundy, assistant director of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources, believes engineering holds the power to teach problem-solving to very young children, and that “such experiences can empower them to do so later in life, when the stakes are higher.”
It is a crazy machine, lots of pieces, really nice
“Oh my God!” a fifth grade student exclaimed when his team’s Baseball Bot whacked a ping pong ball clear across their table. This student, along with 22 other fourth, fifth, and sixth graders participated in a 2015 study that observed the spatial reasoning skills EV3 Lego Robotics kits and Lego MINDSTORMS curriculum encouraged.
In basic terms, spatial ability measures the ability to understand abstract principles, mentally manipulate objects, and comprehend imaginary movements in real space. Professor Brent Davis, Ph. D, an educational researcher and the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Research Chair in Mathematics Education, offers more in-depth activities associated with this, such as altering, moving, interpreting, and sensating objects.
Using Brent’s framework, researchers observed whether these behaviours were demonstrated by 5th and 6th graders in an urban Eastern American elementary school playing with Lego Robotics kits. Analyzing field notes, transcripts, and the children’s robots, the researchers concluded that across projects, the students demonstrated multiple behaviours within this framework as they learned to build and program robots and then make videos explaining how to do so for other students.
For example, while creating their Baseball Bot, a group of boys displayed moving by sliding the robot’s pieces together, interpreting by understanding how their robot’s arm would move while programming it, and situating when they saw their robot’s arm move in time and space as a result of their programming. During the production of their how-to video, after realising their Baseball Bot was hitting the ping pong ball much further than they anticipated, the group of students quickly engaged in sensating by positioning the iPad’s view correctly (immediately insisting “Start over, start over” to each other), using situating to imagine its viewline and (de)constructing by adapting to the ball’s unprecedented trajectory (telling each other “Back up,”), ultimately exhibiting five of the six elements included in Davis’s framework.
Similarly, a group of girls who made a robot dance along to a music track displayed four of Davis’s elements while filming their how-to video: imagining what their 3D robot would look like using only a 2D representation on their iPad displayed dimension shifting (situating), while one girl’s understanding that although she was looking at 13-hole objects for their electric guitar, her robot needed 15-hole objects showed interpreting, and another who cautiously asked “How did we do the first step all correct?” engaged in (de)composition by reviewing steps and determining whether they had followed them correctly.
Another study published in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted in 2012 measured the spatial abilities of 80 American midwestern children between the ages of 9 and 14 before and after participating in a simulated FIRST Lego League Robotics competition with Lego NEXT Robotics kits. Students were given a Project TALENT Spatial Ability Assessments (from the American Institute for Research) that measures subcategories of spatial awareness, yielding significantly higher scores across the test’s subcategories not only amongst each other after the competition but compared to a group of students who did not participate in the competition.
Dr. Helen K. Williams, an educational consultant and member of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics, analyzed research on the role spatial reasoning plays in children’s mathematical development with the help of Loughborough University’s Mathematics Education Network. “When children come to learn about number composition, or numbers being made up of smaller numbers, spatial experiences are important,” Williams quotes of Dr. Sue Gifford, a Principal Lecturer in mathematics education at the University of Roehampton, “because they provide memorable visual patterns and physical experiences of rearranging manipulatives (including fingers) to construct and connect images.”
“... The neural circuitry used to build up a child’s understanding of their external environment, the way they orientate themselves spatially[…]is also used to process numbers and more abstract thinking” Williams also found from Oscar Giles, Ph. D, a Research Data Scientist at England’s Alan Turing Institute.
The University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) collected data, quotes, scientific studies, and activities related to spatial reasoning in 2022 to help people understand the far reach these skills have in the lives of young learners. “Strong correlation exists between a person’s mathematical talent and his or her scores on spatial perception tests, almost as if they were one and the same ability” they quote from a study conducted by Oxford University that connected spatial abilities to indicators and encouragers of many mathematical skills in young people, from understanding that numbers have physical properties to recognizing patterns. Geometry is another obvious skill that these help with, seeing as, using our earlier definition, spatial abilities relate to visualising and manipulating 2D and 3D objects.
It actually totally changed the way I teach. Period.
Engineering reveals children’s worlds as not just the sum of its parts, but a collection of things to be taken apart, examined, and put back together. The visualisation, problem solving, and spatial abilities Lego Robotics encourages are powerful tools in shrugging off narrow perceptions of what engineers do and look like, leading to a sense of ownership over their worlds.
“My students were able to see themselves as capable people who were able to be producers and not just consumers…” one teacher from the urban Eastern American elementary school said of her students after playing with and making movies about Lego Robotics kits.
“It actually totally changed the way I teach. Period.” another teacher from the school claimed, citing the initiative she saw in her students as soon as they knew the basics of Lego Robotics. Her students not only took charge of themselves, but also relished in leading other children to do the same instead of simply waiting for teacher instructions.
Most importantly, these skills are something young people are cognisant of and willing to pass onto their peers. “It takes dedication, and sometimes it’s difficult. You can’t give up super fast” one of the study’s teacher’s students told the researchers. “In the future,” another imagined, “if you do Robotics and become an engineer, you can help the people that never had this experience learn.”
After years of observing children as young as three knocking down towers and curiously taking toys apart, Cunningham believes that despite large gaps in engineering concepts within typical school curriculum, “the more I watch young children interact with the world around them, the more I am convinced that they are natural engineers.”
