Lego Introduces WeDo Package for Education

Lego Education, a business unit of the Lego Group, on Monday introduced Lego Education WeDo, a new robotics package designed for classrooms of primary school students ages 7 - 11. It's coming in January, 2009 -- pricing is yet to be announced.

WeDo is aimed at providing students with some hands-on experience with building Lego-based robotics systems and programming them. It builds on Lego's highly successful and popular Mindstorms products, and it works with Macs, PCs, and OLPC XO and Intel Classmate laptops.

The company will launching WeDo simultaneously in the United States and Brazil. It's describing WeDo as the first product created by Lego Education specifically to cater to emerging markets.

The package includes 158 Lego elements, including gears and levers, a USB hub that connects to a host computer to allow for control of hardware input and output, one more, one motion sensor and one tilt sensor, drag-and-drop icon-based software developed by National Instruments, as well as an activity pack CD-ROM containing 24 hours of instruction and a dozen activities. For educators, Lego has developed WeDo to cover curriculum including language and literacy, mathematics, science and technology.

Lego's Web site had not been updated with information about the WeDo package as Macworld posted this article.