Teaching in the Age of the Digital Native: LEGO Exploring Creative Learning Solutions for Developing Countries

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past ...a really big discontinuity has taken place.. This is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video-games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. (Marc Prensky)

With this realisation in mind, a radical re-think of education and skills development is needed. It's no longer about a teacher at the head of the class-room lecturing a bunch of disinterested students, too busy txting their friends, but about ways to utilise children's competencies and curiosities in the digital fields to improve learning. Another layer to this is the growing digital divide, where said media is becoming more and more important in our lives, but the rate of technology adoption and access is of course the greatest in the Western world, where developing countries are often left behind.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media lab, pioneered a solution to this growing problem through his One Laptop Per Child initiative, where the goal is to create a hundred dollar laptop, available to kids in the developing world to ensure they will not grow up to be the Digital have-not's whose abilities to learn, network and build a livelihood for themselves is hampered by a lack of key skills. As Negroponte puts it: "Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's machine designed for “learning learning.”

Drawing on 10 years of research, product development and success as a consumer robotics pioneer with LEGO MINDSTORMS®,  LEGO Education, The LEGO Group's educational division, today begins testing of creative curriculum solutions in three schools in Brazil to establish the best technology platform for bringing 21st Century skills to students ages seven and older in underserved and developing countries.

LEGO Education is exploring how to harness technology to bridge the physical and virtual play worlds to provide advanced teaching methods that integrate science, math, engineering, language, social skills, and more. The plan is to provide selected classrooms with concept products that foster the hands-on, minds-on creative play for which the LEGO(R) brand is universally known. Ultimately LEGO Education is aiming to provide cost-effective, high-impact, versatile tools that foster creative exploration and learning for those schools and students who need it most to prepare for the future.

LEGO Press release

21st Century Skills

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