The Lego Company has designed a new toy set devoted to teaching kids the basics of coding. The Lego Boost set takes the basics of Lego we’ve come to know and love, and adds coding lessons and activities that will get the whole family involved.
The Lego Boost Creative Toolbox allows kids to build and customize an assortment of toys. Once they’ve finished constructing their toys, they can use coding to program and customize their new creations. The set comes with a variety of options for kids to build; Vernie the personal talking robot is one of them. Using simple coding, kids can alter and customize Vernie’s personality and behavior. The application for the coding is easily downloaded to tablet devices, and provides kids with the basic skills needed for coding and other computer programming.
While Vernie the robot is a coding experience all on his own, it can also be reassembled into a variety of code-friendly devices including Frankie the Cat, Multi-Tooled Rover 4, the AutoBuilder, and the Guitar4000. Besides providing kids with hours of fun, they’ll be able to learn all sorts of coding tricks and techniques.
Lego is banking on the fact that coding (and computer programming in general) are becoming increasingly vital skills. This set provides kids with fun and informative way to learn the basics of coding that could help them with their careers in the future. Lego Boost aims to take the mystery out of coding and turn it into a fun and accessible skill that kids will feel comfortable using in their daily life.
“Using computational thinking to encourage students to explore, build, code, test and refine solutions to engaging STEM challenges, they are better prepared for the real-world challenges awaiting them”.
While programming Vernie will provide kids with hours of fun, he does much more than that. Lego Boost covers all sorts of vital computational thinking skills from abstraction, evaluation, and think to decomposition, generalization, and algorithmic thinking. The hands-on nature of Lego will give kids a unique concept of coding, and a new way of thinking of their favorite toys.
