Lego, Gender and Advertising

Grade 10 recently completed a unit on Lego, Gender and Advertising. This was a great unit and really stirred up a lot of great conversation between students. The two summative pieces of work were they own Lego Billboard Poster and an Essay either supporting or criticising Lego Friends.

We started off the unit by looking at the history of Lego, and focussing on it as a construction toy. Here we watched The Culture Show's episode on Lego and Architecture. After this we looked at a huge variety of different sets available in Lego, including traditional sets like Lego City and Lego Castles through to the more modern sets like Lego Friends, Star Wars Lego and Lego Architecture. Once again we used Lego Brick stacking as a way to show their personal preference, (doing this means that all students are actively involved).

We also spoke about the Lego brand and what it means to each student. They looked at many Lego adverts and discussed if they remain loyal to the brand, showing all the things the students liked about Lego too. It was really interesting to hear their opinions and to see which adverts they loved and hated. It also started up a lot of great conversation and debate! We also looked at lots of adverts for other big brands, focussing on Guerrilla and location advertising. Students delivered a presentation on three adverts they had found - I couldn't believe how creative the adverts my students found were!

 Something else students enjoyed was comparing these four Lego adverts. We focussed on who appeared in the adverts, the language and what the videos say about the Lego brand.

We then looked at the controversy surrounding the Lego Friends series, sparked by the following letter. We listened to the podcast by Pop Stuff, (How Stuff Works) called Pop Stuff Plays with Legos and also watched the controversial Feminist Frequency Lego Videos, (Part 1 and Part 2). My students were great at unpicking the information, analysing the sources and taking things said with a big pinch of salt!

We watched various Lego Friends adverts and looked through their product list. Students did a lot of additional research and created some fantastic essays. Some were for Lego Friends and some were against. Most of them had primary research and some of them had looked at the changes in the Lego Friends brand over time. I was very proud of the work they did and wanted to leave you with some quotes from their essays. To see a full list of quotes click here. To see my unit present click here.

Key quotes from student essays on Lego Friends:

"Michele Yulo noted after comparing toy advertisement that "In the commercials for girls there is often a lot of giggling narrated by a high-pitched female whose tone usually borders on squeaky and flowery. The music is typically bouncy and light." While "commercials featuring boy products are laden with heavy metal guitar rhythms and hard, rhythmic sounds in the background along with a male narrator who has a deep, sometimes dark gritty voice."

"Even though the LEGO Friends theme is deeply stereotypical it does have some merits.The Friends theme emphasis on sharing, relationship building, cooperation and nurturing which are all important values, but these values are entirely absent in LEGO themes aimed at boys. "

"Now you maybe wonder why everyone is against pink? I personally agree with Rachel Giordano answer to that question: “Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. Let’s give all children a world of play that includes all colors and all possibilities, and let’s market it that way”

"As the University of Maryland historian Jo Paoletti argues “Because the pink­for­a­girl, blue­for­a­boy social norms only set in during the 20th century in the United States, they cannot possibly stem from any evolved differences between boys' and girls' favorite colors” (Wolchover,2012)."

"A study conducted by the National Eating Disorders Association, a shocking 42 percent of girls in first through third grade already want to be thinner. (Kelly, 2004) They are brought up to believe this is the way they must look according to society, and the slimming down and sexualization of the LEGO® Friends dolls are only contributing to this."

"This diagram above clearly demonstrates the unnecessary sexualisation and “BarbieTM­tised”makeovers given to the dolls featured in the LEGO® Friends sets. Next to each doll shows what the figures might’ve looked like if kept in style with the rest of the LEGO® universe. LEGO® play does not only aid with development, but can also provide an advantage to children with the concepts and skills related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. "

“Legos are a good introduction to communicating ideas with physical objects,” notes Tiffany Tseng, “Putting things together and taking them apart got me interested in how things work, and by the time I was an undergraduate, I knew I wanted to be an engineer.” (Tseng, 2012). I believe that LEGO® should stop trying to exclusively market to either gender but return to their original approach of a unisex toy for all. This would not only benefit LEGO®’s profits, but also help move our society to a more open­minded one when it comes to gender association with products. LEGO® is a world class product and company, if The Lego Group took these actions, many other companies in the market would follow suit. It would expose more girls to playing alongside boys with toys that stimulates spatial reasoning, creativity and problem solving, thus start a knock on effect of motivating girls to get more involved in the STEM subjects to name an example. As Cate Blanchett’s said when accepting her Academy Award for Best Actress in 2014 “The World is Round People!”

  "According to The Day, “Guns, cars and war games leave boys feeling it is important to be ‘macho’, while girls who play with tiaras and tea sets are made to think they should focus on their looks,and caring for others.” Women amount to 13% of all science, technology and engineering roles.“Toy manufacturers should stop pressurizing children into seeing themselves in such limited ways.” 

“The position of lifeguard has been portrayed and carried out by both women and men in media and in everyday life. And if that doesn’t do it for you, what about ‘Olivia's Invention Workshop?’ If we changed the name to ‘Harold's Invention Workshop’ the only difference would be Harold, the only aspect that makes the either one masculine or feminine is the names. Or what about ‘Emma’s Karate Class?’ This actually involves fighting, a theme commonly found in the “Boys”lego sets” “To segregate and separate girls into their own pastel colored niche, was never the right approach. The thing LEGO need to do is to include girls in advertising for all regular LEGO set and include more female minifigs characters into their themes in a meaningful way.”

LegoLand Trip Review

Last Thursday we took our Grade 6 students to LegoLand Windsor for two workshops.
We unfortunately spent most of the day traveling, as we had cancelled trains, long waits for buses and connecting trains (apart from one very quick change where we all had to run around Slough station!)

We arrived a little late for our first workshop so had to complete is quickly.  The instructor showed us a presentation about different types of fish and habitats and we discussed how the various adaptations, from pattern to shape. Students then made their own fish and presented them to the class.
The workshop was far to easy for our students and probably just for KS2 students. I thought that because the workshop was for KS1, KS2 and KS3 that there would be differentiation to make sure the work was at the appropriate level. At the end of the class the students presented their fish, but were not prompted to talk about how it was adapted for a certain environment. It would have been nice to tie this part into what they had learnt or to have a class game - maybe one where the teacher put different habitats on the board and students had to sit down if their fish wouldn't survive there! I think Legoland missed out on making this really educational, but gave our science teacher ideas for adapting and improving this lesson for her students. The students also really enjoyed the lesson, which is always important! After half-term we can reflect on the trip and get students to analyse their fish in more detail!

Our second session was a bit more useful and related well to the coding students had been doing with me. Our instructor was very good at one on one support with our students but the introduction and explanation needed a bit of work. She asked several closed questions, so students didn't want to answer. If she has asked a really open question to begin, like 'What do you know about coding' then they would have had tons to say and she would have had an understanding of their knowledge/levels.

However this session was still a lot of fun. Students had to build their Lego Lion, then program it to stand up, roar and then sit down again. Many of the computers didn't have speakers, so students were a little disappointed about that, (they wanted to check out all the sound effects to make the lion not only roar, but squeak and beep). The extension task allowed students to get their lions to dance! This was really fun and students had to think about accuracy, so that their lion didn't decapitate itself/shake its own head off!

Ms McDonald and Ms Zago completing the task!

At the end of the session we got a little medal and a certificate. We also had a chance to go on the shop ride and got to go to the shop...where I bought way to much (gold Lego Brick keyring, Lego Halloween Set, Lego Pig Man Mini-figure and the amazing Lego Research Institute)

I also met this creepy Lego Brick

(I have been wanting this set for a while - will use it for my Lego Advertising and Gender Unit - online it's almost £50, but was only £15.99 at LegoLand)

The students had a lot of fun and I would do the trip again, but would spend the full day at LegoLand and would arrange a coach for travel. It would also be good to have more communication between the workshop leaders before hand and would be even better if they provided some exercises/worksheets/presentations/videos to use before you visit and some for after. I also recommend that they differentiate the sessions more, as they were far too easy.

Lego Coders

All my Grade 6 students had to present on a different coding app or website that had been assigned to them - including Touch Develop, Code.Org, Hopscotch, Daisy the Dinosaur, Hakitzu Elite: Robot Hackers, Cargo-Bot, Codea, Kodable and Lightbot. The students delivered amazing presentations and had made their presentations engaging by having Tellagami  and Morfo animations introduce sections or even act as the website/app developers in an interview, students even had their families test out the different coding games and of course all students used bizarre Keynote animations and transitions!

One of my students had even decorated his pages with photographs of Lego Coders that he had created! How cool is this:

I love how they are incorporating Lego into their homework, lessons and even class discussions naturally without any prompting now! Students even filled in a survey about how they would improve the school and one said 'More Lego' and another made an educational song using 'Everything is Awesome' as a starting point!

I am beaming!

Biography Lesson with Lego - Part Three

Another update on the Biography unit we are doing with Grade 6!
[Parts One and Two]

Students homework was to watch a BrainPop video and to take notes. They were also encouraged to do some extra reading and to include this information in their notes. They also broke down their notes into individual events. 

We handed out baseplates and green, orange and red bricks. Students looked at their notes, in the order they wrote them, and decided if each note related to the start (green), middle (orange) or end (red) of his life and placed the bricks on the baseplate in that order.

Students were then asked to make some observations on the Lego patterns. We had some great responses including "I have far too much information about the middle of his life and not enough about the start" and "Although the middle of his life was more important, I probably need more green bricks, because a biography should cover the whole of a person's life."

Students then re-ordered their notes and were told to select one event which corresponded with a green brick, another with an orange brick and finally one for a red brick.

Students were then given the task of making a Lego scene to correspond to each of the three events and were asked to take detailed photographs of each creation.

Green-Gandhi confessing to his father after stealing gold from his brother.

Orange-Gandhi moves to South Africa.

 

Orange - Gandhi moves to London and goes to university at UCL

Red-Assassination of Gandhi

We wanted our students to put their images on Explain Everything to create a mini biography of Gandhi. Michelle had spent some time working on a fantastic example to model to our students.

On the front cover Michelle pointed out all the things their biographies would need, including Gandhi's name, a witty title, the author and an image. Of course we had the students use Mini Mi to create a Lego Gandhi!

Students were tasked with creating their three chapters. This would include an information box, photograph, exciting chapter name and page number. Students were allowed to change backgrounds, fonts and the layout to make it as visually engaging as possible.

They then found a quiet place and placed an audio recording on top of each chapter. This was not there for them to record what was happening in the scene or Gandhi's life, but a space for them to talk about symbolism and the different Lego choice they made.
Students made comments like "I chose to make the prison cell very small as it is not a nice place to be" and "I gave the dad a hat, as he was an authority figure and worked for the Government" and "I gave Gandhi a beard in the last scene to show that he was older and it was toward the end of his life."

Lastly students had to write a page for CAPTAIN REFLECTOR! Michelle designed this minifigure and page idea to get students to reflect on the whole process and I chose some questions to help them with their responses!

 CAPTAIN REFLECTOR!

My Reflection so far:  This has been a fantastic project and students have completed a huge amount of work in a very short time! It is definitely giving me even more ideas for ways I can use Lego in my lessons and I am already writing two units based around Lego, (Lego and Gender and Lego, Social Media and Advertising).

We also had a lovely visitor from Lego Education, who helped us to get even more excited about our Lego project! Thanks Neil!

LegoLand Trip

We will be taking our Grade 6s to LegoLand in a few weeks for workshops to support their Design and Science classes. In Design we are learning how to code and in Science students have been looking at Eco-Systems!

The workshops we are taking part in are:

Computer Design & Control - KS3 ICT, Design & Technology and Science

Want to show your pupils how relevant computer control is? This workshop utilises LEGO WeDo Software where pupils will build and program an interactive model. The workshop covers key ICT terminology and touches on the need for computers in everyday life.

Understanding Underwater Workshop: HABITATS – KS3    Science, Design & Technology

Explore habitats, adaption and classification. Pupils will put their learning into practice by designing their very own LEGO fish before going on our world first underwater submarine ride to study real rays, fish, shark and other amazing sea life. Don’t forget to visit the touch pools on the way out to get hands on with some of the creatures!

I couldn't be more excited! 

LegoLand is easy enough to get to and the tickets are only £8.95 including park entry.

LegoLand provide a few worksheets too, including a great teachers map.

I had a look through their workshops and saw that they even do business workshops for 16-18 year olds! I am doing a Theme Park Design unit with some of my students soon and although they are a little younger it might suit them well.

Expect a review about the trip soon! If anyone else has been and can think of some good learning experiences to have with the students around the park, please send me a message.

Computerless Coding with Lego

I am in a privileged position as I teach students in an iPad 1:1 school, so have always been able to teach coding using our iPads. However I know there are a wealth of fantastic computerless coding lessons and wanted to explore these, to see if students would gain a better understanding of coding!

Students were thrilled when they arrived to my Design class. I had set up base plates, with 5 bricks, papers and pens. We briefly talked about coding, communicating with machines and went over the vocabulary we had already covered, including algorithms, coding and commands.
Todays lesson had students writing an algorithm to get robots to stack lego bricks in a certain way - our robots were students! My students worked in small groups and had one student playing the part of the robot. The robots went to the back of my room and spent some time coding while the programmers wrote code for their robots.  I gave the student the first pattern I wanted them to code, then let them fill in my grid worksheet to choose their own. We had already decided on some simple commands, which were a set of six arrows, four for direction, one for picking up and one for putting down bricks!

Later on in the lesson we moved onto loops! Students were given a choice of extension tasks and could write a function to get the robot to return to the first place, to recognise colours or they could try and code complicated patterns, (most worked on getting their robots to stack bricks!).

I used some Conversation Cards to get students to reflect on the lesson and to check they understood the different concepts.

I also created this 'I Can Code' form for students to show off their new vocabulary!

You can get all the resources for this lesson, including the PowerPoint, all worksheets and more here

I am super impressed with my grade 6s at the moment - they are getting through so much work! In one class we discussed the many skills of coding, watched a TEDx video from 10 year old app developer Jonathan Buchanan, all investigated a coding app/website (I gave them one each), coded Flappy Bird as a class and every student created a game using Touch Develop's Hour of Code! Very happy to teach such an enthusiastic bunch!