Lego uses bricks to demystify AI
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Image: Lego Education
Lego's education unit on Monday announced a new kit designed to use its signature plastic bricks to help kids better understand the AI systems that will play a major role throughout their lives.
Why it matters: Lego's efforts to teach AI in classrooms come amid a broader, messy rollout of chatbots in schools.
The big picture: This marks Lego's most significant move into AI-focused education, even as the company continues adding non-AI technology to its consumer products.
- "It's been really important for us to always stay anchored in what can children do and what do we want them to learn," Andrew Sliwinski, head of product experience for Lego Education, told Axios. The company isn't interested in just chasing "shiny tech," he says.
Between the lines: Many districts still lack clear policies on how students should use consumer AI tools like ChatGPT, leaving families and educators guessing about whether AI counts as cheating or literacy.
- Lego's hands-on activities focus not on chatbots, but on topics like robotics, computer vision, cause-and-effect and logic.
How it works: Lego's new kits include the plastic bricks, interactive hardware and charging cords along with an age-appropriate curriculum that can be used in elementary and middle schools.
- In one lesson for middle schoolers, students use computer vision to make sense of a Lego minifigure doing skateboard stunts, similar to the way real-life athletes and teams use AI to study sports performance.
- The sets begin shipping to schools in April, starting at $339.95 per kit, or roughly $85 per student.
What they're saying: "AI is often presented to children as this magic box where you put a prompt in and text or images or videos or book reports come out," Sliwinski says.
- "AI literacy isn't about teaching how to use the magic box. It's about handing them a screwdriver to take the box apart."
Flashback: Lego has long played a role in education, especially in robotics. In recent years it has merged bricks with electronics to help teach coding, physics and other concepts.
- In 2019, it introduced Spike Prime, a colorful combination of bricks, motors and sensors that came with a coding curriculum for middle schoolers.
- Lego's Smart Play system, introduced at CES last week and set to debut in March, includes a "Smart Brick" embedded with sensors that can detect proximity to other tagged bricks and minifigures, enabling interactive, responsive play.
Go deeper: Museum exhibit on AI prompts hard questions
