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He has had countless hours of enjoyment building with LEGO bricks and then making up stories using his LEGO creations as props. Now that he is older (almost nine), he also enjoys the LEGO software games.
A couple of years ago, someone told me about the FIRST LEGO League. We attended the Kentucky competition in Bowling Green in January 2007, just to observe.
We were very impressed with the way something fun like building with LEGO bricks was paired with science to provide a great educational experience for the children. |
After that experience, I felt motivated to organize a junior level LEGO League team in our area to participate in the 2008 competition. I also thought that this would be a great way for my son to meet other children who shared his interest.
My initial challenge was how to locate other 6 - 9 year olds in our county who loved building with LEGO sets. So I checked with our local 4-H Cloverbud Club Leader to see if she had any recommendations. She immediately suggested that I consider forming a 4-H LEGO club. After conferring with our local 4-H Youth Development agent, the Mercer County 4-H LEGO club was officially created. This arrangement has worked out great! We utilize their space for meetings and they publicize the club in their monthly 4-H newsletter. We had no trouble recruiting kids for the club - our current membership includes nine children. Moreover, this club fits in nicely with the new Kentucky 4-H core curriculum - Science, Engineering, and Technology - which was added for FY 2008.
Our club's first meeting was in September 2007. During that fall, in preparation for the January 2008 LEGO League competition, we met twice a month after school for 1 hour. For the first few meetings, I divided the boys into pairs and they built models using the LEGO educational kit (#9632). I wanted them to get to know each other and get used to working together on a project. We also had a short snack time at each meeting. The focus of the 2008 FIRST LEGO League competition was on energy. So in the October meetings, we conducted an energy audit of our meeting room and had short lessons on energy and simple machines in addition to LEGO building time. We invited a guest speaker from a local utilities company to one of our November meetings. He explained the process whereby coal is converted to electricity.
The boys built an awesome LEGO project for the competition! It showed a coal processing facility complete with a motorized conveyor and a coal car on tracks that transported the coal (tiny black LEGO pieces) to a power plant. Power lines from the plant connected to a small building that had two tiny LEGO light bulbs inside that actually turned on by remote (the light bulbs and remote were adapted from a LEGO train set). At the competition, they did a great job talking to the judges about their project. Each team member received an individual medal and the team was awarded a trophy for the "Best Research." Everyone enjoyed seeing the other LEGO projects, especially the older kids' robotic projects.
After the January LEGO League competition, the club started meeting monthly. I take LEGO educational kits (Z979632, Z779610, Z779612, Z779614, Z779616) to the meetings, plus a huge container of my son's LEGO pieces, because I have discovered that some kids prefer the kits with instructions and other kids enjoy building their own creations. One month, I asked the boys to bring a LEGO project that they had built at home for a "show and tell" time.
Because my son will be in 4th grade in the fall and wants to participate in the FIRST LEGO League robotic competition, hopefully we will expand to having two 4-H LEGO clubs - one for 1st - 3rd graders who can compete at the junior level, and one for 4th and 5th graders who can compete in the robotics competition.
This whole experience has been interesting and fun for me and the club members! I am glad the boys have the opportunity for a hands-on spatial 3-D type of learning experience, which is so different from the conventional paper/pencil learning experience. When I look around the room at the meetings watching them build, I wonder if they will be the engineers, architects, scientists, inventors, and computer programmers of tomorrow.
For more information on FIRST LEGO League and the 4-H program, please visit the following websites:
Submitted by: Sandy Rippetoe Harrodsburg, Kentucky