I have been teaching on the mountains in the Fuxing District in a remote area for many years, but I have never had the opportunity to take children to do some curriculum design about robotics teaching, I mean something like arduino or circuit boards, or to do something like Gigo Chicco building blocks The kind of mechanical structure design course that I have, mainly because I am not very familiar with circuits, electronics and programming languages as the only person who teaches information technology in school. Although there is still some experience in HTML or CSS and other website applications of web design, the teaching of scratch and other similar teachings in schools has always stayed at a very early stage.
Opportunity to choose LEGO 51515 Mindstorms as a teaching aid
There are many manufacturers on the market that are selling some teaching parts similar to some robots or bicycles, such as micro:bit, Codey Rocky Cheng Xiaoben, Raspberry Pi, etc. There are many kinds, you can work hard Park Science and Education’s website sees many teaching kits applied to STEAM courses. But when teaching, I actually don’t want to focus too much on the program logic, because I think that children on the mountain can do it with their hands, and they can have a little more imagination space for children to play, which will make the course more fun. Although I used to know the LEGO ev3 robot, the price of EV3 should be quite high earlier, and EV3 has also been launched for a long time. Later, I had a chance to see the teaching kit of the Lego SPIKE Prime robot 2 years ago. In 2022, I just had a fund. When I wanted to buy some Lego robots for purchasing and teaching, I found that Lego has developed a product in 2020 New LEGO robot kit: LEGO 51515 Mindstorms Robot Inventor.
About LEGO 51515
In terms of positioning, there are several types of households, but the number of accessories and the structure of multiple motors are very convenient for application in teaching sites. It is very similar to SPIKE, the price is slightly lower, and the application is very wide. Finally, I chose this A 51515 for teaching.
This set of kits sells for around 10,000(TWD), which is about 2,000 (TWD) cheaper than Lego SPIKE Prime. Look carefully for some stores and have the opportunity to find more than 9,000 (TWD).
Another important point is that in addition to purchasing which teaching aids to use for a long time, one of the biggest difficulties is that teachers cannot be found in remote areas at all. A particularly partial school in the Taoyuan area], so I am the only one in the school who can teach information technology, and I must also have sufficient learning resources to know this group of LEGO 51515 earlier than the students.
Fortunately, on the website of the PChome bookstore, I saw a book 【Lego Robot Creativity Collection】 written by the Japanese【Isokawa Fangren】. This book is not based on assembling a very large and complete robot in the impression. The goal is to introduce this set of LEGO Robot 51515 kits step by step through more than 100 small examples, which can be used to make single motors, or dual motors, as well as these applications that add sensors, that is, books. There are a lot of essences mentioned above, but many examples are combinations that can be carried out in 1-2 lessons.
【Lego Robotic Creation Collection】
I found this【LEGO Robotic Ideas Collection】 example to be very suitable for the teaching method of Yisheng Elementary School. Because the school’s students, whether it is a club or a holiday course, the students who come are very irregular. If we are trying to complete a car or a robot in his official set of LEGO 51515, it may accumulate a complete teaching hour of more than 5~8 hours, and our students have never operated it at all 【So is teacher】.
And now for the workshop activities in the summer vacation of 2022, I have 8 lessons to plan, so I have applied many examples in books to guide students to operate, so that students do not know it at all, and by each lesson There are still small achievements and works in the classroom.
There are more Lego 51515 videos on the Internet than web pages
In addition to this book, I have also seen several teaching examples about LEGO 51515 on the Internet. Usually, I find videos on YouTube, and there are relatively few introductions on the website.
Maybe this model is a model that has only been sold since 2020, so many schools in Taiwan have not yet used it, because the school’s investment in early STEAM may be to purchase ev3 or LEGO SPIKE robots, and some schools may It is because of the budget, probably using Chicco and micro:bit for teaching purposes, but I hope that what I will teach students to do is noble and not expensive, and as mentioned earlier, we hope to have relevant learning resources【OK , Let me learn first】, so I chose this group.
We bought 6 sets of 51515 robots in the first half of 2022. It is also divided into two purchases. The first time I bought 4 sets, and then I bought two sets. in summer teaching. We first dismantled 5 units and used 【6 of students】. During the summer teaching process, we also discovered several times that because of the large number of parts, it was not so fast for students to find specific parts. Find some specific parts and help students organize them first. That is to say, in the classroom, students are only exposed to a limited number of Lego parts and building blocks to make combinations, which is quite convenient in the beginning of teaching.
After getting familiar with the students in Sections 3 and 4, when they found that their creativity would require more parts to make a combination, they opened up a part of the scattered parts, allowing them to explore and develop their own creativity. Therefore, in the application of LEGO parts in elementary school education, whether it needs to be sorted out, or classified according to the attributes of the parts, and how to efficiently open the parts for students to use, this aspect may still be considered.
On the whole, I think LEGO 51515 is suitable for school education, although it is positioned at home with parents to accompany children to learn. My summer teaching activities this time are from the first grade to the fourth grade. A total of 6 students, I think students over 8 years old are also big enough to learn without having to wait until they are 10 years old, but this aspect needs to be operated by the teacher. Over 10 years old may be able to watch the exploded diagram of the APP demonstration for self-study.
Some parts are relatively small, but the lower grade students will not have much problem with the combination, and they are more worried that they will not be found when they fall off the table. In the following course sharing, I will share the LEGO 51515 teaching content, planning and experience of the eight lessons in the blog, which will also be regarded as a teaching record.
