Starting The Year With SPIKE™ Essential And SPIKE™ Prime
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What is your favorite LEGO Education lesson to start the year?
We asked the Education Impact Team to share some of their favorite lessons to kick off the year. Hopefully, their ideas inspire you to try out these lessons with your students!
My favorite Back to School lessons for SPIKE™ Prime can be found in the Invention Squad Unit.
I love how this unit showcases the Engineering Design Process and the start of the school year is a wonderful time to ground your STEM/STEAM classes in that process. From defining the problem with the Help lesson, to iterating on your prototype with Hopper, to testing and troubleshooting and finally putting it all together to solve a real-world problem linked to prostheses, the Invention squad unit will really help bring the Engineering Design Process to life for your students!
Hopper Race
Every teacher knows how important establishing a classroom culture is early in the year.
One routine and structure that was always very important for my classroom was having “brain breaks.” When transitioning between subjects or after digging into some particularly dense content, it was often helpful for students (and adults) to have a little movement, wiggle, or stretch break to decompress for a moment.
That’s why one of my favorite lessons to do with my students is the Break Dance lesson using LEGO® Education SPIKETM Prime. During this lesson, students build and program a break dancer to move in sync with music and light.
Break Dance
One of my favorite SPIKE™ Essential lessons for the beginning of the school year is Good Morning Machine.
Students create a hand-waving machine, and I would have them use extra bricks to build their name. We would follow with a gallery walk as a great way for students to get to know each other. It also introduced Leo and the rest of the minifigures using this lesson.
For SPIKE™ Prime, I like to start the year off with the Getting Started tutorials in the SPIKE App. We use the first tutorial, the Hub, as a regular check-in for how students are feeling. They can use the lights on the hub to design a smiley face, frown, or tired face to let me know how they are doing.
Good Morning Machine
We would also love to hear from you – What is your favorite LEGO Education lesson to start the year?
My favorite Back to School lessons for SPIKE™ Prime can be found in the Invention Squad Unit.
I love how this unit showcases the Engineering Design Process and the start of the school year is a wonderful time to ground your STEM/STEAM classes in that process. From defining the problem with the Help lesson, to iterating on your prototype with Hopper, to testing and troubleshooting and finally putting it all together to solve a real-world problem linked to prostheses, the Invention squad unit will really help bring the Engineering Design Process to life for your students!
Hopper Race
Every teacher knows how important establishing a classroom culture is early in the year.
One routine and structure that was always very important for my classroom was having “brain breaks.” When transitioning between subjects or after digging into some particularly dense content, it was often helpful for students (and adults) to have a little movement, wiggle, or stretch break to decompress for a moment.
That’s why one of my favorite lessons to do with my students is the Break Dance lesson using LEGO® Education SPIKETM Prime. During this lesson, students build and program a break dancer to move in sync with music and light.
Break Dance
One of my favorite SPIKE™ Essential lessons for the beginning of the school year is Good Morning Machine.
Students create a hand-waving machine, and I would have them use extra bricks to build their name. We would follow with a gallery walk as a great way for students to get to know each other. It also introduced Leo and the rest of the minifigures using this lesson.
For SPIKE™ Prime, I like to start the year off with the Getting Started tutorials in the SPIKE App. We use the first tutorial, the Hub, as a regular check-in for how students are feeling. They can use the lights on the hub to design a smiley face, frown, or tired face to let me know how they are doing.
Good Morning Machine
We would also love to hear from you – What is your favorite LEGO Education lesson to start the year?
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LEGO® Education Tips and Tricks
09/19/2023 2:35pm EDT
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Competition Ready
My favorite so far has been from Competition Ready. Training camp driving around was a fantastic lesson, especially the debris field challenge. We actually came up with our own debris field and the students loved how I added layers to the challenge.
For example after maneuvering through the field students needed to program the robot to stop as close as possible to the statue without knocking it over.