The beauty of Lego has always been its simplicity. The iconic bricks don’t talk, flash or move---except in your imagination. Until now.
Lego just unveiled Boost, a clever kit that introduces programming and a touch of tech to the bricks you grew up.
Kids, and kids at heart, can attach any Lego bricks to Bluetooth-enabled programmable motors and sensors. A wheel module turns your car into a racer. A walking module makes your robot dance. An “entrance” module ensures that the gate guarding your castle rises. A host of sensors let you program your creation to make noise, light up, and react to motion.
Lego did not, strictly speaking, create an educational tool, but the $160 kit, available in August, does a great job sneaking learning into playtime. “Fundamentally we want kids to have fun first,” says lead designer Simon Kent. "We want them to actually understand how they can put behaviors in their models, and if a byproduct of that is they learn a bit of coding, that’s great as well.”
Kids develop that understanding through an accompanying app, which offers 60 activities. A drag-and-drop coding language similar to MIT's Scratch teaches the basics of programming logic by helping kids connect the code blocks needed to elicit a given behavior. Want your Lego cat to meow on command? Simply connect the audio coding block to a motion sensor block. Voila! Any time you wave your hand in front of kitty's face, it responds. “The more activities you do, the more you learn," says Kent.
In a way, Boost is a simplified version of Mindstorms, Lego's advanced programmable kits. Kent says the setup is basic enough for a 7-year old to figure out, but flexible enough for kids to build increasingly complicated behaviors as they hone their skills making their bricks talk, flash, and move.
