LEGO® Spike Prime training in Belgium
In Covid-19 times hands-on training sessions tend to be hard. But on Wednesday 2nd of September 2020 teachers of Provil, Lommel (Jasper Vandeweyer, Thomas Gielen, Rob Geusens, Raf Dilissen en Koen Boekx) and the Flemish Future Classroom Lab Ambassador (Ben Bastiaensen) had an excellent online training on the LEGO® Spike Prime. The session was led by Dimitri Dekyvere from Vives College in Kortrijk, Belgium.
During the session the participants learned hands-on how a LEGO® Spike Prime is programmed. Several real-life problems were taken as examples in this training. But in a 3-hour session only the tip of the iceberg of possibilities can be demonstrated and tested.
All this new knowledge will be used by the Provil teachers during:
- STE(A)M lessons provided to the pupils of the first 2 years of secondary education (12-14) at Provil. The focus will be on LEGO® Spike Prime.
- Primary schools in The Lommel region are offered to possibility to lend LEGO® We Do 2.0 kits to wok on STE(A)M related goals in their own schools. All participating teachers will receive a thorough training before taking the LEGO® We Do 2.0 kits to their schools. Afterwards they will also get the opportunity to test out the LEGO® Spike Prime in order to see if it can be an added value at their primary school.
LEGO® WeDo 2.0 Training for primary school teachers
In Belgium the "Take The Action" project focusses on 2 main targets:
- LEGO® Spike Prime in the first 2 years of secondary education @ Provil, Lommel
- LEGO® WeDo 2.0 in primary education supported by Provil, Lommel.
And for this second target a training session was held in the LEGO® Education Innovation Studio @ Provil. For several years Provil has provides multiple primary schools in the region with Lego WeDo 1.0 kits on loan. They also provided training for the primary school teacher. This allows the primary school to reach their curricular goals concerning STEM and get the support of LEGO® and STEM professionals. Within the framework of the "Take The Action" project Provil is now upgrading their support to LEGO® WeDo 2.0. This starts with testing the new materials in four schools (age between 8 and 12 years). To start this, primary school teachers need to be trained with the new material. On Thursday 29th September teachers of the involved primary schools had their Training @ Provil. They learned hands-on about the new mini robots as well how to manage a lesson using the LEGO® WeDo 2.0 kit and a lot of other things. Afterwards the teachers went home with enough knowledge to start teaching their own pupils. We are looking forward to see motivated children and get the feedback from the teachers.
LEGO® Spike Prime @ Coding Webinar
On 22nd October The Flemish Ministry of Education in cooperation wit European Schoolnet organized the webinar "Hoe werkt een computer? coding in je klaslokaal." (in Eng. "How does a computer work? Coding in your classroom"). After an introduction into computational thinking, and the possibilities CodesCool (Jr) has to offer, Jasper Vandeweyer from Provil presented the use of LEGO® Spike Prime as a tool to learn computational thinking and coding to pupils. During this session attendees learned about the possibilities of the LEGO® Spike Prime and how to program it.
LEGO® Spike Prime @ Provil Lommer
Over the last months pupils from several class groups at Provil Lommel, have been working with the LEGO® Spike Prime. These pupils are all 12-years old, but take lessons in different fields of study, ranging from more theoretical to more practical courses. De LEGO® Spike Prime learning resources are very extensive and differentiated enough so that are suitable projects for all pupils.
Pupils in the first year of STEM education started with the "Super Cleanup" project, and investigated several grabbed. The teachers also changed some of the projects a bit, so that the pupils could investigate their own improvements of the grabber.
The results of working with the LEGO® Spike Prime are very good. Both teachers and pupils are very enthusiastic about it. LEGO® Spike Prime will get a fixed spot in the curriculum at Provil Lommel.
