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Coding Toy: Lego WeDo 2.0
Lego has always been known to be educational and fun; from their classic bricks, to the architectural miniature skylines, to the robotic Mindstorms. While my daughter has not yet played with the Mindstorms, I did want to introduce her to the robotic side of Lego, and that is when we made the purchase of WeDo 2.0.
This set is really tailored toward educators for group activities, and Lego does have other sets tailored towards individual play such as the Lego Boost. We, however, opted for WeDo 2.0, because there is already set lesson plans for teachers to guide kids in demonstrating how programming and robotics work hand in hand to bring science and discovery to life. This means there is already a set plan for me to pick and choose and be my daughter's partner in playing with the WeDo Robot. For listing of the available lesson plan you can build with WeDo 2.0, check out Lego Education's Lesson Plans.
The set itself is 280 pieces of lego with sorting tray and labels for each types of blocks. The central blocks for coding are the WeDo 2.0 smarthub, motor, motion sensor, and the tilt sensor blocks.
Once you open the packaging and finish sorting the blocks, the rest is really for you to explore with the WeDo 2.0 App, which is available on Mac, Windows, Chromebooks, Android, and iPad. The App includes quick tutorial of what WeDo 2.0 is as well as instruction for how to build the very first robot.
My daughter enjoyed building her first robot, and she wrote a review on her experience building Milo, the name Lego gave the robot. For a review on WeDo 2.0 from a fourth grader's point of view, take a look at Cynthia's post on Lego Robot Milo.
For me, it was an enjoyable experience with my daughter to introduce her a hands-on demonstration of how coding impacts robots. However, while Lego is always brilliant at providing explanation for building and construction, understanding the instructions to get the robot moving in accordance to our programming was not exactly as easy:
1. Battery installation - no where in the instruction does Lego show how to install the battery for the robot. After some fumbling and grumbling, we finally discovered that the battery is to be places within the WeDo 2.0 Smarthub. To access the battery compartment, simply slide the top off of the WeDo 2.0 smart hub:
2. Programming Block Descriptions - once you have built the robot, it seems you can dive right into coding with the programming blocks within the app. However, while the introduction provides some basic instructions to show you moving forward and stop, the explanation for the rest of the blocks was not very clear. That is when I had to search for a full block description myself, which can be found here.
This programming block description can help you understand how to set up the coding blocks a little better, but I would recommend you to play with it first before introducing to your kids so they don't lose interest along the way while you are figuring out how to control the robot to its full capacity.
WeDo 2.0 also has the capability of being programmed with Scratch. The programming under Scratch is a little bit more intuitive and may be a easier place to start for you and your kids. This is especially true if you have already programmed with Scratch before.
I fully believe the WeDo set has great potential for inspiring kids to play with robotics and coding (after getting through the 2 hiccups above). Lego also offers more building instructions for other variations of robots,and I also want to build other robot models based on our own imagination!
Take a look at some of the things we have tried with WeDo 2.0 in our YouTube videos. You can also use our coding blocks to get started with programming WeDo 2.0:
Changing the speed and stop
Doing some looping:
Testing out WeDo 2.0's climbing capability