Innovation examples at a young age
Röde Eriksson
Museum pedagogue and instructor for the TechnoX team, winner of the FIRST LEGO League Championship 2006
The Future’s Museum is an experience centre entrusted with the task of stimulating the interest of children and youngsters in natural sciences and technology. Interactive displays, experimental workshops, planetarium programme and a great deal more awaken the experimentation desire and the joy of discovery. The museum was opened in 1986 and was then the first Science Center in the country. The first Lego Educational Center in Dalarna was opened in the spring of 2004 at the Future’s Museum.
Computerized Lego
Computerized Lego is used here for instruction. Students come to this museum to develop their knowledge of technology in a pleasurable and creative manner. It has become very popular to come here and engage in problem solving. The material provides direct feedback, which is a great strength. You can see immediately whether or not you have arrived at the right solution.
The focus is on mechanics and process control. There are great similarities here between our way of working and how things are actually done in today’s process industry, where computers are used for controlling the various stages in the production process. Children become accustomed to working on the basis of a long flow chart, which may be very useful to them in their future working life. By a trial and error procedure, they quickly learn how they should think.
Girls and boys work differently
A disadvantage of our working in Lego is that some may regard it as a little silly. Teenage girls in particular may initially have a negative attitude. So it is best not to have mixed groups. Girls and boys also generally have different ways of tackling a problem. Boys plunge right into the problem, work quickly and make mistakes, but learn on the way. Girls take their time in thinking about the problem, are focused on finding the solution, and want to see a result.
Choice between five programmes
We currently have five programmes to choose between at the Lego Educational Center.
1. ROBOLAB, where you program a robot to perform various tasks using sensors and computer power. You can either program an existing robot, or else you build one yourself.
2. The mechanics programme mainly involves building models based on four fundamental mechanisms: gearwheels, levers, pulley wheels, and wheels and shafts.
3. The Intelligent House is based on using intelligent solutions in our home. In this case too, a computerized control unit is used for performing various tasks.
4. In the eLab, students are able to experiment in the principles of energy and energy conversion. We build designs that employ renewable energy sources such as the Sun, wind and water.
5. Moviemaker provides facilities for creating animated films.
Two competitions every year
We arrange two competitions every year in order to inspire gifted youngsters. The ROBOT CONTEST competition is run in the spring and uses computerized Lego. The teams have one day to design and program their robots to perform a task that is secret right up to the competition day.
Dalarna University and the Future’s Museum arrange a FIRST LEGO League Championship every autumn. This event has now been run for five years and is based on regional contests, in which youngsters in various teams design/build and research a certain given theme.
Microcomputers, motors and sensors are some of the components used for producing a robot that performs various tasks. The judges are drawn from various companies, including SSAB.
Junk Yard Babies are champions
The competition is run simultaneously in several cities in Sweden, and the winning team will represent Sweden in a Scandinavian final. Many youngsters from Dalarna have recorded major successes here. The Junk Yard Babies team from Borlänge won the Scandinavian championship on two occasions. In addition, they won the design and theory prize this year for their research into nanotransistors.
Nanotechnology is this year’s theme
The TechnoX team won this year’s championship in the regional finals. The theme for this year was nanotechnology. This team, which comes from Djurmo/ Sifferbo, will demonstrate its competence during the seminar, and represents a living example of how play can lead to advanced knowledge. If we could get more youngsters to discover the thrill of technology and if more of them took up technical education as a result, we will have achieved our objective.