Last spring, first graders became urban planners as they designed their own city using Legos.  As part of our study of community, they were also given the real-world problem of producing as close to zero waste as possible in Lego city.  

 

This five-month project began with selecting, building and planning residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional buildings, as well as public spaces within the limits of a city. The Lego City/Bee Bot project crossed through disciplines of environmental studies, city planning, math and technology.  

From the start, first graders made pivotal decisions and gave compelling arguments to steer the class as they identified real world trash problems, and teams presented proposals on how to solve these problems, with peer feedback. The student-driven nature of this project gave them ownership in the deepest sense and pride in their efforts.

The Legos, Bee Bot robots, and the real-world factor also made the students invest heavily in this project, making them eager to continuously revisit their work, giving them plentiful chances to reflect and adjust their thinking. The many stages of this learning process and the metacognition required to move from one stage to the next, in addition to the multiple modalities involved lent itself particularly well to design thinking.

 

Regular “thinking sessions” helped teams define their current repository of knowledge, formulate theories about people’s needs and motivations concerning trash, and frame new questions to test their theories. Student teams tested their theories through video-taped interviews, then reformulated their knowledge to create innovative solutions to their chosen trash problem.  

Other creative opportunities for applying their knowledge came through transferring their learning into a new context, such as when teams turned the poster presentation of their trash problem solution into an actual robotics Bee Bot mission within Lego city that would implement their solution. Students tested the validity of the new knowledge they made about Bee Bots when constructing roads using snap cubes. Students experimented with Bee Bots to calculate how many snap cubes a Bee Bot moves for each command and how wide a road needs to be to clear turns.

Student teams problem-solved and became active knowledge makers, creating many iterations of Bee Bot code and roads structures before finding the perfect road design that would allow three different Bee Bot missions to execute their mission, pick up the trash, through the streets of Lego city.