Lego Robot Nerds

 As I've said before, we're a Lego-loving family, especially my middle two kids.  I'm also trying to encourage coding skills (the kids play a programming logic board game called Code Master and they're doing things on Scratch.)

A few years ago Secundus took two semesters of a Lego WeDo class.  She LOVED the classes but I didn't love the location.  The next year I decided to instead just buy the WeDo 2.0 kit so she could do it at home and also teach Tertius.  Buying the kit was comparable to paying for a one semester class for one student! (Thankfully our charter school purchased it for us and we can keep it as long as we're enrolled.)

This year Secundus decided she was way too advanced for WeDo and was ready to move on to Mindstorms.  This year I really wanted to scale back the number of classes/number of times we leave the house during regular school hours (for my own sanity!)  So I really didn't want to sign her up for a Mindstorms class.  However, when I saw that purchasing the kit was more than $400 I about choked!  At the end of the year we would probably have enough school funds left to buy it, but I was going to make her wait for now.  Secundus was bummed to say the least.

But thankfully the school came to the rescue! Our school has a garage where they collect all of the school supplies, textbooks, science kits, and the like when families dis-enroll or are otherwise finished with them.  Since the school already owns these items, they are available for free for any other family that wants to use them.  In the past we could ask our supervising teacher to go to the garage and pick up things for us, but we had no way of knowing what was available and you were lucky if your teacher was willing to take the time to drive out there and search.  In the past year, though, the school has made great strides in making it more accessible to all families!  Now we can search the online database, place a reservation, and then have it mailed to us (if our teacher is unable or unwilling to go get it.)  It's so awesome!  I reserved so many things this summer!  I found lots of necessary curriculum that I was planning to purchase, books that are nice to have, plus a ton of fun things that I knew my kids would appreciate.

So the point of all that is to say that I was able to get Mindstorms EV3 and the older version of Mindstorms for FREE from our school garage!

Today during science time the boys chose to do WeDo, with Tertius acting as Quartus' teacher, and the girls did Mindstorms together.  It made my heart so happy to see them excitedly working together on their projects!