Inspiring Students To Rebuild The World - Reviewing LEGO Education’s SPIKE Prime Kit
This is the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime Kit, a creative spin on what I would describe as “curiosity and creativity with a purpose.” LEGO Education sent me this kit (so yes this is a paid review but my own thoughts and opinions) to take a look at how they are supporting young people in building resilience and confidence in STEAM education.
LEGO Education’s mission is to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow, enabling every student to succeed through creativity, collaboration, and hands-on learning.
With the SPIKE Prime kit, this mission aims to inspired young people to Rebuild The World a mission, that based on this kit aims to empower young people to seek out new opportunities and challenges and understand how technology can be a tool to create real change.
One of the aspects I am most excited about is how this kit has the potential to crossover and support the development of 21st-Century skills and an entrepreneurial think, so I was eager to see how LEGO Education has taken their robotics kits farther than the EV3 kits which I used with my 8th graders in 2013.
So let’s get creating!
When looking at any STEAM kit, the first challenge is always going to be the cost. There is no way around it, if a STEAM kit costs over $100 it is not equitable. That is not the purpose of the review as no kit company is immune to this. My focus here is on why this kit can provide an amazing experience for students. At $329.95 on their site, you get more than just LEGO bricks, motors, and sensors. I was pleasantly surprised to see an incredible scope of lessons that promote resilience, curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. Once I finished digging through the various activities focused on inventiveness, entrepreneurship, life hacks, and an intro to robotic league competitions, it was clear that LEGO Education’s focus with this kit was teaching kids how to think about, design, and build something that has a purpose and it’s having that “purpose” that intrinsically motivates students to engage obstacles, grapple with failure, and persevere over challenge because, in the end, they have something of value to showcase and celebrate their work. Spoiler alert, it’s not a worksheet. 🤭
For my own experimentation, I jumped into the Kickstarting a Business series of lessons. While this is far from an exhaustive and intensive review, I was pleasantly surprised to engage with it right out of the box. I hope to explore this kit in-depth with my Chief Research Officer, aka my 10-year-old son sometime soon.
Resilience
What I like about this kit is the open-ended nature of the activities. With just enough structure for teachers to feel comfortable, and students getting started, it is far from a cookie-cutter STEAM experience, and that CAN be a good thing. While that sometimes can be frustrating for students that are indoctrinated in the game of school, that struggle is a life skill that they need to engage in and embrace because the world is full of challenges and unknowns. In my experience, I have observed students losing their core curiosity at the elementary level, and by middle school, they want to know what the instructions are and what the adults in the room want them to do for the grade. STEAM experiences like these can be a refreshing experience outside the experiences that are drive grade-based learning. The way that LEGO Education connects these to real-world experiences and processes to their SPIKE Prime Kit is quite impressive. I started my own building a bit confused and uncomfortable moving forward because I was given the “freedom” to create my own experience. At least that’s what I told myself when wearing my "I’m a middle schooler” hat. When I realized there was “no wrong answer” I dove in, which is what I hope students will learn to get comfortable with. Throughout the lesson activities, students will fail, become frustrated, and confused, and it is up to us as their teachers to help them overcome this and achieve not just the goal, but the awareness that those hard experiences are valuable to achieve something greater than the status quo. An important observation I have seen over the year is that young students have not yet lost their mindset that “nothing is beyond repair”. As they get older, their experiences create a sense of functional fixedness, that limits resources, ideas, and possibilities. What is great about this kit, and my own 30 years of experience building with LEGOs is that there is a really empowering (yet frustrating) moment where you’re 10 stages into a build and realize its backwards BUT repairable. This kit does an amazing job of connecting that failure, reflection, and fixing to the real-world and the builder’s life.
Bottom line is that this kit gives young people a chance to step up to a challenge, work through the confusion with curiosity as a north star, and then build something that does something. If you can build it, fail, and fix it, then young people will be better prepared to “Repair The World” around them.
Curiosity
Curiosity is intrinsic. You can’t grade it, you can’t make it, and it can only exist because of the environment the person is in. I think that the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime Kit does a great job of sparking student’s curiosity. I could imagine an 8th grade exhausting the potential of the kit and then experimenting with the parts and Scratch coding inspired interface to try and design their own creative robotic solutions. That would be the true test of potential curiosity. While that might be a long term approach, there is still a healthy dose of curiosity found throughout the lesson experiences. I definitely see curiosity developed through hands-on experiences (I even dedicated a chapter to it in my book!), and LEGO Education’s play-based learning solutions like the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime helps students bolster their curiosity through experiences that are tactile, cognitive, and promote social-emotional learning.
Bottom line is that curiosity is the catalyst for these lessons. This isn’t a “Learn STEAM or Computer Science lite”” this kit focuses on helping students think about how they might consider solving problems they see in their life and the world around them.
Creativity
Growing up, it didn’t take much of a stretch to associate LEGO with the word creativity. I vividly remember being 9 years old and building the Caribbean Clipper in an evening just to dismantle it and build my very own space-traveling sailing vessel. Who knew that sails could work in space? 🤯
In my book Educated By Design, I challenge the Webster definition of creativity. While it can be described as the act of developing a novel or new solution to a problem, I think there is more to it. Consider the difference in the creativity of a 10-year-old and a 10 year veteran of neuroscience research. I think that how we “define creativity” should focus on one’s personal frame of reference as much as a global one. Meaning that if a 10-year-old creates an automated sensor system to wake themselves up with the morning sunrise, that level of creativity is a major milestone for them even if such a contraption could easily be designed and built by a seasoned professional. I think one of the cool things about this kit is how it is designed in the context of creative problem solving and not just building technically challenging contraptions.
Bottom line is that creativity is about coming up with problems that have real-world impact. Many STEAM kits focus on the technical complexities of mechanical engineering and computer science and miss out on the creative drive of using both of those acts to do good in the world.
Critical Thinking
Being able to analyze, adjust, and act on a decision aka Critical Thinking is a huge skill. It might be one of the most important skills of the 21st-century and will be a key differentiator between us and the evil robot empire bent on world domination. Ok, maybe not quite, but you get the point right? Critical Thinking isn’t about just about analyzing data sets or making connections between different objects or ideas, critical thinking is about defining the right scope of judgment in a scenario to make a decision. Robots will do that efficiently and humans will do it empathetically. The unit and lesson themes in the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime kit definitely tap into an empathy-driven type of level of critical thinking. They look at ways to use machines and coding to help others, to improve their lives, and to make decisions that promote social good. While that is a stretch with other kits that focus on technical skills, I really am impressed by the way that this kit connects to ELA skills, and builds in not just the critical thinking of creation, but also communication as well.
Bottom line is that critical thinking in this kit is about the experience and not just complex activities. You are challenged to develop your own solutions that solve a problem for yourself or someone else. The outcome is that critical thinking leads to social good, and that is a major skill for the 4th industrial revolution.
Conclusion
Product Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
The LEGO Education SPIKE Prime Kit is without question a game-changer product if you can afford it. It is the only (that I know of so please push back in the comments below) STEAM kit that brings engineering and design into the real world in a thematic way focused on life hacks, entrepreneurship, and real-world problem-solving. My only two critiques would be that it was a bit overwhelming to start when considering the perspective of the average middle schooler, and will need significant support for students to get started. Other than that, I think that there should be some option to move beyond the Scratch inspired code block experience and move into programming the kit with Python. While the SPIKE Prime kit DOES allow you to code your build using Python in the app, that only helps if you already know Python. I would recommend this kit to any school that is able to meet in person, and would even imagine this being an amazing holiday gift for a child who's curious and thirsting for an innovative challenge.