"Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process.
Crickets are based on more than a decade of NSF-funded educational research. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers collaborated with the LEGO company to create the first "programmable bricks," squeezing computational power into LEGO bricks. This research led to the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. While LEGO MindStorms is designed especially for making robots, Crickets are designed especially for making artistic creations. Crickets were refined in collaboration with the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) museum network, and are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (PICO)."
"One of the most well known plagues of all time was the black plague. It terrorized globally throughout the coarse of the Medieval ages. Reaching western Europe around the start of the 100 years' war (early 1300's) Here is a demonstration, in Lego!"
Great video about Seymour Papert, the Media Lab, Lego Mindstorms and the development of both the Mindstorms robot platform, Scratch and inspiring learning. A little feel good for Lego and MIT but the overall history is correct and inspiring.
"Lego seems to never wane in popularity and my class love it. This site allows you to convert a photo into a blockish Lego image - great for profile pictures and class displays."
Project based learning in the technology classroom diary: T minus one week After spending 3 weeks teaching my grade 9's project management using Scrum, we finally moved on to Alexey Krivitsky's terrific and well-known Lego City simulation.
The first of two episodes with Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Professor of Learning Research, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Laboratory.
"I am of an age where if, as a child, you said you were bored the answer was likely to be, "Only boring people are bored," and be left to find something to do. There was always something to do, go outside and throw a tennis ball against a wall, go out on your bike, do some colouring, play with the Lego, do a jigsaw OR if you really got bored do your homework or tidy your bedroom!
Nowadays it seems that the majority of children do not often seem to say that they are bored. They don't often have to find their own entertainment, use their imagination or even have several hours at a time that are not pre-filled with activities. Parents (normally) want to do their best for their children. Charlie wants to do football - that's 5:30 on Wednesday, Sammie wants to do ballet - that's 4:00 on Thursday, extra maths, Judo, trampolining, swimming, cubs… the list goes on, frequently only limited by the time to fit the activities for 2/3/4 children into a week."
"Today Papert is considered the world's foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn. He has carried out educational projects on every continent, some of them in remote villages in developing countries. He is a participant in developing the most influential cutting-edge opportunities for children to participate in the digital world."