On Wednesday, Dr. Susan Imholz (who completed her PhD at MIT working with Seymour Papert) treated several committee members from across all disciplines to a demonstration exercise in Lego Logo, a curriculum tool which marries the Logo programming language to Lego kits. This program enables students to build small motorized vehicles, the movements of which can be directed through the Logo programs fed into the computer. This allows for the introduction at an early age of the concept of variables, which might make the transition to more advanced math concepts easier. In the demonstration, we were asked to write simple code that would direct our cars to follow the path of a triangle. Working together, we mastered the exercise. It is clear that this could be used for cross-curricular lesson planning. Students could build the lego cars/robots, draw maps (ART) for the robots to follow, write narratives (Language Arts) about the path taken by the cars, and finally create Logo programs using mathematical concepts.Related links:
http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/
http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/Iceland_dest/Default.aspx
