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Robotic tools make learning fun for kids Nivriti Butalia / 28 September 2013 Coloured LEGO bricks are familiar to most people who’ve shopped in toy stores. Those interlocking bits of plastic that children play with, creating buildings, vehicles and such like out of those bricks, only for those structures to be taken apart again. Steen Lund of LEGO Education is on a mission to make learning fun. You get this impression the moment he hands you his ‘business card’. The business card is not a conventional flat paper card, but a plastic thumb-sized LEGO brick man wearing a green cap and glasses, and white shirt. On the front of the toy man’s white shirt, it says STEEN V LUND, and on the back is written his contact details. Because this innovative toy of a business card is so tiny (but effective!), there isn’t space to fit ‘Territory Manager for Europe, Middle East and South East Asia, LEGO Education’. Lund quotes Einstein (‘Play is the highest form of research’) while unveiling the latest robot tool for classrooms called the EV3, launched by LEGO Education and Atlab. ‘There’s a new robot in class’ is the tagline of this new refined product from the education arm of LEGO toys, a company present in 60 countries. There is the necessary spiel about how they are not bringing ‘toys’ into the classroom, they’re bringing in ‘learning tools’. Robots in the classrooms? There seems to be no doubt about the fact that robots will, definitely aid teaching. “It is a resource,” says Kerry Bailey, Special Advisor, E-learning, Abu Dhabi Education Council, according to whom, there are 286 public schools within Abu Dhabi that already have robot kits that can be assembled and are assembled by eight- to 18-year-olds. “Over 1,200 schools in the GCC countries — excluding Saudi Arabia — have since 2005 adopted robot teaching resources,” says Senthil Kugan, general manager, Atlab — the official distributor of LEGO Education in the GCC. Interestingly, as Bailey says, “I have never heard of a discipline problem in a robotics class,” as all kids are head-bowed and working at their study desks, engaged and learning about Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (known as STEM; and now with an addition of arts, the acronym for learning becomes STEAM) But there is no fear of class teachers being altogether replaced by these machines (made of lego bricks, but also fitted with battery-operated touch sensors and little computing units that can be fed commands). Teacher as facilitator At the age of 13, Bora Edis and Sharan Bhatia of the Repton School are a supremely confident duo who in just four hours the previous day — by following instructions, sitting with a new interface — assembled a moving device and programmed it to move backward and forward, even installing a fork lift. Domnique Cave, their proud ICT teacher (information, communications and technology) says, “They’ve learnt more in the last two days by interacting and assembling the bricks than by sitting in a classroom.” She says her role has become that of a facilitator, “they teach themselves”. nivriti@khaleejtimes.com What is EV3? The EV3 is the next generation in robotics-based learning. The platform has reinvented science, technology, engineering and maths, also known as STEM, by integrating hands-on designing and building activities into teaching material. Continue reading →