Welcome to LEGOengineering.com Version 2.0. It's version 2.0 because behind the scenes there were some big changes to make the site faster and more responsive. Hopefully, your internet browsers will appreciate the upgrade!
So, What else is new?
Learning Lab
We're really excited to have Eric Wang's podcasts hosted in V2. While there are a lot of ROBOLAB podcasts at the moment, he's promised that there are plenty of NXT-G ones in the pipeline. Learning Lab Activities editors Adam Carberry and Elissa Milto have been filling in more and more activities. There are also some new Learning Sequences on gears with both the RCX and NXT to check out.
News
We're really gearing up the News section in this version. We want news to capture information that educators are really interested in. We added 3 new writers to the staff to try and get more writing done. Hence, we have 3 new articles, a cool new NXT design, some in-depth NXT-G info, and a fun college engineering robotics activity. But, we definitely need more - Let us know what you are doing! Write to
with an activity or event that happened in your classroom, school, or museum using LEGO materials. Stay tuned for our upcoming survey and expose on "Bins versus Kits: The real story on piece storage and management."
Community
We've re-established the Events section of Community (after a small technical glitch). Currently, it features the LEGO Engineering Conferences. The LEGO Engineering Conferences are 1-2 day events for educators hosted around the world - from California to Connecticut to Singapore. They are different at each site but generally feature talks by educators who are using LEGO Mindstorms in their classrooms and small hands-on workshops on the RCX and NXT (with ROBOLAB and NXT-G). If you have an event, workshop, training, or anything else you would like to let the LEGOengineering.com community know about -- e-mail us (
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Resources & Downloads
We added just a few PDFs to the Library for this version (how to write efficient NXT code as well as some element surveys). We're hoping to hear more from the community on how migration from the RCX to the NXT is going so we can add some real stories to the Migration Guide.
Support
Kristen Bethke, the knowledge base editor, has been working tirelessly to incorporate more classroom questions as well as NXT-G software questions. She's added some hard working Tufts engineering undergrads to her section to try and keep up with the demand. Definitely, keep those questions coming. We'll also try and keep you posted about software updates for both ROBOLAB and the Mindstorms NXT Edu Software.
What's Next?
Our next priority is to really try and expand the community aspect of LEGOengineering.com. We really want the site to help build a community of educators who use LEGO Education products in their teaching. Our vision is that LEGOengineering.com is that a middle school teacher from Alabama could come to the site to find a great unit on weather using the NXT. She would also be connected to other educators from around the world who had tried the curriculum who could help her with ideas and resources. It's definitely a long term vision but we're working on ideas for forums and blogs to facilitate it. We've also been working to engage more experts and advocates from the LEGO community to help shape the future vision of the site.
