Lego WeDo and Scratch

A few days ago I treated myself to a Lego WeDo construction set. I had been debating for a few months whether to buy it, but when I discovered that it could integrate with Scratch I felt that the decision was a bit of no-brainer so I went ahead and put in an order.

 

The box contains a variety of Lego pieces together with a: motor, distance sensor and tilt sensor which can all be connected to a computer via USB to be controlled. You can purchase some special software made by Lego to program your control systems, however I found that this wasn't really necessary since the familiar Scratch software lets you carry out pretty much the same tasks and also has the bonus of being free.

This helpful guide I downloaded describes what extra Scratch functionality is provided when the Lego WeDo controller is plugged in to your computer:

To say that I found it easy to control the motor using Scratch would be an understatement - all I had to do was double-click on a 'motor on' command block to get it moving and then double-click on a 'motor off' block to stop it again. The distance and tilt sensors were just as straightforward, with me getting Scratch to display their values on-screen using the 'Say' command block as I either moved the tilt sensor around or moved a pencil back and forth in front of the distance sensor to check that they were working.

 

The fun really started however when I began to incorporate them into some actual Lego models - not least due to the fact I had no instructions to follow since these are only supplied if you buy the Lego software and not when you just buy the bricks! My building skills didn't seem to mind the challenge of copying from some photographs I found on Flickr though, and I happily spent a good couple of hours building two models and creating two simple programs to control them using Scratch:

A Pair of Spinning Birds

A Hungry Alligator

As you can see, the results of my efforts were pretty good and I could definitely see the curriculum potential here since they required me to use loops and conditional (IF) statements to program an actuator (the motor) to work. I'm sure that children would love to learn how to complete their own similar projects themselves (presuming that they already had a little prior experience using Scratch) and would certainly find the task a lot more intuitive and exciting than other 'control' projects I've read about/delivered. I would highly recommend getting the set and would love to hear about anyone else's experiences of using it in the classroom.

Comments

[James]

I bought some lego WeDO sets at BETT this year and have been using them with year 5. We haven't yet integrated them with scratch - I noticed the new version of scratch (? 1.4) a couple of weeks ago so will probably save that for next year, but the kids loved working with the WeDO. I modelled building projects for the first two weeks, then set them project briefs to build models to achieve goals for the next few - e.g. one was a car which moved forward and reversed when it hit an obstacle. Another was a fan which changed direction depending on the position of the tilt switch. Although the supplied WeDO software is reasonably easy to use, I suspect the Scratch interface will be easier for them to program (and will allow them to do more), so am looking forward to finding out!

[djembii]

But with the scratch you have some resstrictions which the Lego-SW doesn't have:
* With Lego you're able to attach 3 Hubs, each of the capable of attaching 2 devices (motor or sensor).
* With scratch your are able to connect one hub only and on that hub one motor only. You may be able to overcome the latter with abee's (http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=500075#p500075) hack, but then you have no access to a sensor anymore.

[Hymanroth]

Hi, I decided to buy some WeDo parts without buying the whole WeDo starter kit because I just want to use them with Scratch. Do you know if Scratch is available to interface with the WeDo USB hub without the Lego software being installed? I don't really feel like paying $80 for a USB driver...

[Mr Haughton]

Hi,

You'll be pleased to know that you don't need any Lego software to integrate WeDo with Scratch - just plug it into the PC and Scratch recognises it :-)

regards,

Simon Haughton