• Question: How can you use legos to teach?

    Asked by blahbluenx to Ben, Mark on 15 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by randomguy.
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 13 Nov 2011:

      When you smash atoms apart you find that everything around us is made up of just 12 building blocks, which we called the fundamental particles. Fundamental because as far as we know they cannot be split apart, and particles because they are the smallest things from which Nature builds the Universe.

      LEGO is just another type of building block, by using different LEGO blocks to represent the 12 fundamental particles we can recreate the way Nature builds the Universe in LEGO. The history of the Universe can be written as a set of LEGO instructions.

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      Hi blahbluenx, randomguy

      When we perform experiments at big facilities its quite different from how you do it at school. Each of the experiments has to be designed and build by scientists and engineers first, and a lot of the experiments need to be done by remote control, as people often aren’t able to get to (or possibly move) the experimental equipment without lots of motors and computers to help them.

      As this is so different from the experiments that you do at school, my idea is to use some Lego Mindstoms (these are the Lego kits which include motors and ways to control them with a computer) and to connect this to the software that we use at Diamond to control our experiments. This means that a class could build the experimental equipment, and then use it to perform experiments in almost exactly the same what that we do at Diamond.

      Hope this answers your question, and have fun with the rest of the event 🙂

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