The Power of Lego: Lego Education at ISN

At ISN, STEAM education is at the heart of our curriculum, and one of its most vibrant components is our partnership with Lego Education. This collaboration is more than just play; it is a powerful tool for developing essential skills like logical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving, allowing our students to become confident High Performance Learners. Our dedicated SPACE Centre at ISN serves as the hub for Lego Education, where students are encouraged to be risk-takers and thinkers. By fostering a critical and creative approach to problem-solving, Lego Education increases our students' confidence and prepares them to navigate and shape the world of the future.

Unlocking Language and Innovation

For our international community, Lego serves as a universal language. It allows students from all linguistic backgrounds to create, innovate, and communicate their ideas through building. This hands-on approach inspires imagination and fosters healthy debate and discussion as students work together to solve complex challenges.

A Progressive Curriculum: SPIKE Essential and SPIKE Prime

In the Primary School, all students, from as young as Early Years, engage with LEGO as a fundamental and powerful tool for hands-on learning. From Grade 1 onwards, this is complemented by the introduction of electronic LEGO. Our Lego Education curriculum is carefully designed to grow with our students, offering age-appropriate platforms that deepen their understanding of robotics and coding:

• SPIKE Essential: This platform encourages students to investigate STEAM concepts using a hands-on, play-based approach.

• SPIKE Prime: This platform is a more advanced learning tool. It builds on earlier experiences and introduces students to sophisticated coding, including text-based languages like Python.

Lego and the Units of Inquiry

As a PYP school, we seamlessly integrate Lego Education into our Units of Inquiry, ensuring that technology and coding serve a purposeful role in student learning, for example:

• Grade 3: As part of their How The World Works unit on how exploration poses challenges and opportunities, students tackle the "Happy Traveler" unit, using Lego to model and solve travel-related problems.

• Grade 4: In their How The World Works unit focused on natural forces and technology, students engage with the "Crazy Carnival Games" unit to see how understanding physics enables us to design better machines.

Building Knowledge Through Creative Projects

Beyond the SPIKE platforms, we utilise traditional Lego to solidify knowledge across a variety of fascinating topics:

• Grade 2 Space Inventions: Students designed space-inspired inventions intended to help people on Earth, blending their knowledge of the cosmos with human-centered design.

• Grade 5 Disaster Lego Island: In this complex project, students created an island and had to prepare it for environmental challenges, such as a hurricane, while balancing its needs as a potential tourist attraction.

Fostering a Future-Ready Community

Our dedicated SPACE Centre at ISN serves as the hub for Lego Education, where students are encouraged to be risk-takers and thinkers. By fostering a critical and creative approach to problem-solving, Lego Education increases our students' confidence and prepares them to navigate and shape the world of the future.