LEGO MAZE – UNPLUGGED ACTIVITY

Publication date: November 19, 2019

By Aurora, Code Week Teacher in Slovenia

Every year we try to involve as many pupils in coding activities as possible. This year we participated in the eTwinning project “We love coding„ with activities that go from pixel art to robotics and
from lego to code.org.

The LEGO MAZE (unplugged activity) is an accumulative activity and may be done in the math classroom or as an integrated unit with languages and art classes.

Pupils learned about labyrinths by resolving some on paper.

 

 

Then, they design their own maze with different materials.

 

 

A small group of pupils from 4th grade created a Lego maze. They created a double labyrinth, one in each side.

 

 

From here on, the next steps differed depending on the age range.

1st grade – Teacher asked their pupils to take a look at the problem (maze) and to walk their lego figures step by step out of the maze. For this, they worked alone or in pairs.

 

 

For the 2nd grade, the teacher introduced all the given signs (arrows) and asked the pupils to write down the sequence. They had to put the papers in the right order to make the figure walk through the maze.

 

 

In 3rd grade the teacher didn‘t give them arrows, they had to write the sequences alone instead. Pupils quickly realized it took them too long to write ten times “foward„. In this case, they discovered you can introduce the work “loops„.

 

 

UPGRADE:

Give the possibility to all the kids to create their own lego maze in small groups or pairs.

 

 

Solve mazes from other groups. Introduce arrows also in 1st grade.

 

 

To conclude, they all loved working with LEGO, so if you have lego bricks, make your pupils do their own mazes in groups, perhaps older to younger classes. They are very creative, just give them the chance.