August 11, 2024
Updates for Week 2; On LEGO & STEM
Though not everyone could make it, we had a team meeting today to start putting together the fourteen individual mission models of the competition, and got through about half of them. Since there are only eleven weeks left to prepare, we will continue making mission models here throughout the coming week so the kids can focus on actually solving the missions. “Submerged” is a fun theme, and some of the missions look rather challenging. The kids should look at the video or read the rulebook to start thinking about how to solve things.
No computers next week either. We need to do some strategizing and to divide up individual responsibilities and tasks for the coming season. I’d like the kids to take up some individual specializations in building, coding, or research, or even keeping closer track of where we are every week as the season progresses.
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Last week I mentioned that I would write a bit more about relevant things my daughter and I did prior to the FLL competition, and this time I have a few points about playing with LEGOS.
Back before she grew out of them, my daughter was really into Disney princesses, and we bought quite a few of their LEGO sets. The princess thing was kind of how our family got into LEGOs. Some of the sets we bought were from a more difficult age range than was appropriate for my daughter at the time, but I thought she could handle them with a little help, so I would do things like sort pieces or help pull stuck pieces apart. Even though I hadn’t really played with them since I was about 11, I could still put them together and had kept a nice pile them in storage. We pooled all of our pieces together, and this resulted in a sizable collection of LEGOs. We had so many, in fact, that instead of buying the large and expensive Disney princess castle, we used our own pieces to build one. It’s still standing today.
We got ambitious with using LEGO to teach our daughter about robotics and programming, so we bought the LEGO Boost set around when it came out in 2017. It was a good set, and the kids on our team still used Boost for some of our early exercises a couple years ago. Boost is significant because it gives a sense of the trajectory of the LEGO company’s attempt to synthesize robotics and STEM with their mainstream toy line. That is, Boost combines their well-loved brick-based modeling toys with much more complicated machine and robotics parts. The company had sold these special parts under slightly different brand names. The mechanical parts have been around a very long time under the category Technic (established 1977!), but these models had historically tended to be very ugly, as they relied on their functional abilities to simulate real machines like cranes or trucks, rather than emphasizing good looks.
Here’s an older Technic set.
After years of producing Technic toys, LEGO pushed further into STEM and robotics with programmable robots such as the 1998 Mindstorms set, which featured even fewer recognizable LEGO bricks, but added a wallet-sized computer “hub” that could program and run things like a bipedal robot. This robot consisted of the hub; modular attachments, such as small motors and sensors; and LEGO bricks to arrange all the parts together. It’s clear that the current Spike set we use for the team is a considerable advancement from the older set.
These Mindstorms sets went through several redesigns, but remained rather ugly, such that when the Boost set was released, it defined itself through its concerted effort to present better looking models built with more recognizable bricks, while still retaining a programmable hub and varied modules.
My daughter quite liked this robot cat that could be made with the basic Boost set.
I think the form and overall look of the robot cat (as well as that of some of the other Boost models) were integral in keeping my daughter interested in LEGO robots. The functional Technic and Mindstorms sets appeal to a much more limited set of people than the mainstream LEGO toys that actually resemble the things they model. And certainly, the kids would be much less interested in the FLL competition if the mission models and challenges were merely abstract mechanical exercises and didn’t resemble things from real life. For instance, this year’s “Submerged” set doesn’t just have robots pushing and pulling various switches and boxes; each of the missions is modeled after different undersea narratives, so there are fun sunken treasure chests, as well as more serious themes like preventing coral depletion. These narratives capture the kids’ attention much more than the mechanical configuration of the models themselves, but the latter are also often very creative.
The robotics competitions for older kids after FLL lose this sense of narrative play in the construction of robots and challenges, and instead focus on the technical aspects of mechanics. High school robotics teams build big metal robots designed to win more competitive, sport-like events, and while there is a lot to appreciate in the designing of the metal machines, I think important things might get lost after FLL, particularly in the transition away from narrative play and free creativity. One nice thing about the FLL competition is that it balances the development of technical STEM skills with more of the fun stuff, and that direction seems closely in alignment with how the LEGO company has been recently developing its toys.
I should add, though, that there’s a good amount of back and forth in how the toys are designed from year to year. The newer Technic sets have been looking a whole lot more realistic than the ones from just a few years ago, whereas the current Spike set that the kids use for the competition leans much more on the technical side of things rather than the fun, mimetic side presented in the competition themes like “Submerged” or last year’s “Masterpiece” sets. Spike incorporates a more robust programming language grounded on Scratch, and can even be programmed with Python. It’s got a range of fancy sensors, like an accelerometer in the hub, but it lacks any instructions for fun cat robots.