Community Corner

Greenfield Students Learn Through Legos

Twenty-six summer school students participated in a Lego education class, where students learned about gears and simple machines, problem-solving and social skills and so much more.

About two dozen Greenfield elementary school kids were sad to have summer school come to an end Friday.

No, seriously. They were upset. Distraught. Bummed out. Literally.

At least, that was the common reaction among the 26 students in teacher Catrina Grosz’s Lego Education WeDo class at .

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“It’s the last day, which really stinks,” Nathan Popovich, 9, said.

The popular summer-school enrichment offering taught or enhanced what students already knew about gears and simple machines, problem-solving and social skills and so much more.

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“The ability to work with others, teamwork,” Grosz said. “That’s a skill they’ve all had to learn. They each bring their own level of (Lego-building) skill set, but what they are leaving with is how to share, how to give up control of the Legos, how to give up control of the computer.”

During Grosz’s four-week class – there was another class for younger students – children built monkeys, ducks, lions and alligators.

But these aren’t your father’s Legos. Heck, they’re not even the Legos this writer grew up with. No, these Lego kits are complex collections of basic Lego parts combined with motion sensors, working motors, wires and USB connections.

So, the monkey pounds his arms, the ducks spin, the lion sits up and the alligator – nicknamed Mr. Chompy, by one group – snaps his mouth shut.

The students, who are entering third through fifth grades in September, create the animated model using the guidebook and an instructional video as part of specialized kits purchased by principal Dan Carr. The building of the model can take only a few minutes, according to the students, or last the entire hour-long session, depending on its complexity and the students’ ability to work together.

The model is then plugged into a computer’s USB jack and moves based on how the children program it. Program it correctly based on the instructions will move it in a way demonstrated on an instructional video; program it wrong and the students have to figure out where they went wrong.

Students are in three classes during the summer school day, with two more traditional academic classes sandwiching a “fun” class, like the Lego offering. Grosz said that organizational pattern has caused an uptick in attendance for some students.

“My first and third classes are basic math classes,” she said. “Some days, I get 50 percent attendance in any one day. I’m not able to reach them, get them going on anything.

“This class has significantly higher attendance. They are coming 95, 98 percent of the time. That’s makes a huge difference. It’s not just that I’m glad they’re not missing my class, but they’re not missing the reading or the math that’s happening on either side of this class.”

Carr, the Glenwood principal and summer school coordinator, said he hopes to offer an afterschool Lego workshop at his school next fall. It’d be offered to approximately 20 students, five of whom could be students in need of a problem-solving skills boost.

“I can't wait to get these kids doing more with them,” Grosz said. “We had such limited time this summer and since I had never taught anything like this before, I learned a ton about how to organize it and get it going.”

Grosz took a Lego robotic WeDo class and got an education on the building blocks from her 12-year-old son Mason, a Lego maniac himself. From the sounds of it, the first-time Lego teacher hit the mark.

“This is awesome,” said 8-year-old Aisea Faleta. “You get to build Legos. When we free build, we get to build anything: an airplane, a submarine, a car – it was great. When we started doing this (the kits) we thought they’d be boring, but they turned out to be fun.”


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