Creativity has always been a key element of education, but the past 18 months have put educators across the world under pressure to come up with creative solutions to new problems. Whether that’s through the switch to remote learning, teaching in a socially distanced way or working out just where students’ skills are after a prolonged period away from the classroom, each time educators have risen to the challenge, offering innovative and effective ways to ensure that learning can continue.
LEGO Education is proud to have supported schools through this tough time, just as it has in the past and will do in the future, in a variety of innovative ways. For more than 40 years, LEGO Education has been providing hands-on, playful Steam (science, technology, engineering, the arts and maths) learning experiences for young people of all ages and abilities, enabling active, collaborative learning that is full of creativity and critical thinking.
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It’s the kind of learning that teacher Shafina Vohra experienced first-hand - unexpectedly - several years ago. She is now head of faculty and an A-level psychology teacher at the London Design and Engineering UTC and a LEGO Education Academy teacher trainer. But her first educational experience with LEGO came in a previous school, when she was asked to teach Year 7 science classes and found that the students were eager to be more active in their lessons.
“I started applying my psychology principles of attention, memory, engagement, all the things that drive learning,” she explains. “I bribed my son to borrow some of his LEGO bricks and took them into school - that was just it. It changed my life as a teacher and changed my students’ engagement and understanding.”
Using LEGO to grow students’ creativity and critical thinking skills
Her young classes would use the bricks to demonstrate their knowledge of key concepts, such as the structure of cells, she explains, and the “playful hook” of exploring these ideas with LEGO would mean that “they didn’t realise how much learning was happening”.
In fact, the LEGO activities became so popular that students were soon asking for them every lesson, she recalls, and it became a useful reward mechanism for motivating them in other tasks. Meanwhile, she had no idea, she laughs, that LEGO Education existed.
“I was just trying out a new way of learning, not knowing that there was something called LEGO Education at the time. I just took the regular LEGO from the store, and it went on from there and snowballed to where I am now,” she says.
She now uses LEGO to explore complex concepts with her A-level psychology students. In lessons on the Stanford prison experiment, for example, students will build their own versions of the experiment and then discuss what modifications they could make to improve it, using high-level analytical skills in the process.
Vohra has also since travelled to Denmark to become a certified LEGO Education Academy teacher trainer, and now spends time helping other educators in her school, her area and beyond to use the LEGO learning system and make the most of the enthusiasm it inspires in students of all ages.
The LEGO Learning System has been designed to make it simple and fun to implement Steam learning in an intuitive, inclusive and adaptable way, making sure that every student is met wherever they are in their learning journey, whether it’s in the simple act of building (as with Vohra’s Year 7s) to exploring far more complex concepts (as with her A-level students), even to creating prototypes for their own Steam projects.
“The LEGO Learning System offers the kind of playful Steam learning experiences that allow students to develop the confidence and 21st-century skills they’ll need to succeed now and long into the future,” explains Esben Staerk, president of LEGO Education.
And that’s the idea driving the latest addition to the LEGO Education family: the BricQ Motion range, which allows students to explore forces, motion and interactions in a tangible way. It offers a hands-on understanding of physical science concepts and an analogue introduction to computational thinking, which is all the more welcome for students after a long period of having to work in a remote and/or distanced way.
“Learning in that sort of [hands-on] context helps with memory,” Vorha explains. “It makes them happy, and they enjoy learning. And it’s a sort of self-learning - obviously with the teacher’s direction and instruction - but self-guided. I’d love to work with other schools and spread that good practice.”
And Staerk says that, after an unprecedentedly difficult year and a half, he hopes more teachers will be able to use LEGO Education to create the sorts of lessons they want to teach and have the kind of impact that makes a real difference to learners.
“The challenges educators faced this past year have been unlike any other, and through it all, they have shown extraordinary resilience as they continue to rethink learning and focus on whole child development,” he says. “It is our hope that the solutions and resources we provide at LEGO Education not only help educators build engagement and excitement but also inspire their students to become lifelong learners.”
Find more information, including resources to inspire your students, at LEGOeducation.com/LearningSystem
