Lego Mindstorm shows why schools could become irrelevant

IF A nine-year-old can build a remote controlled Lego car in less than three hours with no adult help — could traditional school learning be finished?

• Size of classes not the real key
• Education needs a radical rethink
• Too much focus on tests
• Homework debate heats up

LET me share one of those “water-cooler” conversations from our office last week. My colleague was recounting how her nine-year-old received a Lego Mindstorm set for Christmas.

Mindstorm is Lego’s response to the growing interest of young people in building and programming objects such as robots.

Thinking it would be a whole-day project, my colleague was shocked to find her son had constructed a sophisticated remote control Lego car in just two-and-a-half hours.

This is a student who is not identified as a ‘high achiever’ at school or considered to have strong literacy and numeracy skills.

Yet he completed the task without any assistance and now wants to program the car.

Students are learning more outside school. Picture: Mediaphotos

This is a familiar story in homes across Australia.

It demonstrates the capacity of young people to focus on a task they are engaged in and learn independently.

There was no teacher or school in sight, which is why these stories for me are equally disheartening. Imagine what a child who is highly engaged could achieve in six hours at school each day!

These examples are the reason why schools need to be transformed.

If more young people are finding more interesting things to do, create and learn at home, then school will become increasingly irrelevant.

For many young people, school is more a place for socialising, not for learning.

Schools might be made irrelevant by new at home technology. Picture: Mediaphotos

For the past month, thousands of young people have been engaged in activities that have not been planned, assessed or interrupted by bells.

They haven’t needed to put on a uniform or complete a homework task.

What have they learnt? For many of them, quite a lot but most schools will never know because we rarely tap into the learning that happens outside of school hours.

As my colleague showed, parents don’t need to be tech gurus to support learning for their child. Know what interests your child and go from there.

There are thousands of resources and online tutorials for almost anything. Set the challenge, offer guidelines and learn together.