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I am starting to see some of the fruits of my labours in the different range of schools that I am working in currently.  The video you see here was taken in a school recently, when a student who I have worked with a couple of times came up to me wanting to share his latest creation.  When we last met he showed me the stop motion video he had created using a webcam and some LEGO characters, it was excellent.  He had done the work in collaboration with a friend during their lunchtimes at school.  It was not part of any project related to school, it was simply something that they wanted to do.

He is the kind of student that once he has got his teeth into something, he will not let it go.  In other words he shows remarkable resilience and tenacity.  When we met again recently he showed me his LEGO NXT creation, it is in short brilliant.  He told me that it took him “…literally hours to work out the bugs in the programming.”  But he stuck at it, and the video results speak for themselves.  I have now suggested that he adapt the shooting mechanism to not fire pellets but rather to trigger a digital camera.  In other words turn the attack robot into a surveillance robot.  I have no doubt that he will do that and I look forward to my next visit to this school.

What this student has shown are many of the key statements in the NZC vision statements.  How do you plan to create situations in a classroom that engender resilience for example?  A tool such as the LEGO NXT can and does do this as do tools such as Gamemaker, which I am starting a unit on in another school this Friday.  I have long been a fan of LEGO NXT as a teaching and learning tool and have posted about it before on the Supertanker It is these kinds of scenario enabling tools that should, I believe, be given greater prominence in classes to build capacity for resilience in our students.  Not to mention the quality of thinking, collaboration, engagement and authenticity that these tools provide.