Using lego in the classroom: making implicit ideas explicit

This morning I gave a guest lecture for my colleague from Engineering at York University, Jeff Harris, focused on cognitive learning strategies discussed by Weinstein, Madan, & Sumeracki (2018) – a reading that students were assigned to read before class. In class, I challenged students to build lego representations of these strategies. The purpose of this creative lego activity was to deepen students’ understanding of these strategies by making their implicit ideas about them explicit. Here’s a sample of what they came up with!

The activity sparked interesting discussions, and helped students identify what aspects of the assigned reading material they needed to review and/or clarify. It is definitely a teaching exercise that I will use again in the future.

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