NIWeek ‘06 - Carnegie Mellon/LEGO Education Develop NXT Curriculum
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006
We’ve known for quite some time about the collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and LEGO Education. During this week’s NIWeek 2006, however, they have published an official press release detailing the collaboration on the new LEGO Mindstorms NXT curriculum aimed at middle and high school students.
“Students working with the new Carnegie Mellon curriculum are required to ‘do’ math and science rather than study them”, says Robin Shoop, director of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy, quoted in the release.
The educational activities were developed using an iterative process with Pittsburgh-area schoolteachers. Teachers would periodically visit the academy, work with the robot kits and Carnegie Mellon-developed lesson, and provide feedback. Their suggestions would then be incorporated and assessed by the next group of teacher-testers.
Foreign teachers rejoice: the CD-Rom will likely be translated in as many as nine languages.
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NIWeek ‘06 - LabVIEW Toolkit for LEGO Mindstorms NXT
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006
Last week, Guy hinted at the release of a toolkit that would allow users to program their NXT robots in LabVIEW. Well, today at NIWeek 2006, National Instruments officially announced the LabVIEW Toolkit for the LEGO Mindstorms NXT!
Here’s the official press release:
National Instruments, a global leader in virtual instrumentation, today announced the NI LabVIEW Toolkit for LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT. With the new toolkit, LabVIEW users can create and download VIs to operate and control the MINDSTORMS NXT robotics platform. Third-party software and hardware developers also can use the toolkit to create native blocks for MINDSTORMS NXT software. MINDSTORMS NXT, the next generation of the popular LEGO robotics invention system, became available earlier this month and includes a new programming environment, custom developed by NI and powered by LabVIEW.
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