STEM challenges with a 'LEGO Masters' experience!
When I started Brickulum, I assumed that most schools would want to run a robotics incursion, but a large proportion of schools have requested a program with STEM charged LEGO Masters challenges! Students get to engage in a series of build activities that are revealed in a similar way to the way they are on the show. Some challenges have twists and every challenge has those all important time calls! It’s truly amazing to see how much the students thrive with the little bit of extra theatre and drama!
The great thing about the STEM build days is that I am able to see entire levels at a time and, if we run single sessions, we can even timetable the experiences so that the entire student body can be seen in one day! If there was ever a way to kick start or reinvigorate your STEM program, this would be one very high energy, high impact way to do so.
Example school programs
I’m delighted to be able to offer a fully catered package to suit your school’s individual needs and budget. Having now worked with over 50 schools and organisations, Brickulum now offers a huge variety of programs including LEGO robotics and LEGO STEM build challenges.
Here’s some of the exciting examples from a few of our partner schools. They are by no means exhaustive, but a good sample of the types of activities we can undertake when you have Brickulum come visit your school or organisation.
Mitcham Primary School – Whole school (F-6) over five days – Let’s build something Bricktacular with access to over 100,000 LEGO® pieces!
Mitcham Primary School run a week long event where every class in the school rotates through several challenges in a double session. We’ve run a range of challenges and one year, every group built an amazing LEGO bridge that spanned an 80cm gap and we tested to see how many kilograms each would hold with a grade 2 group taking out the win! We’ve also run activities from building a tower taller than me (or reach the ceiling) and inclined plane racers all the way through to the amazing hanging brick challenge – making something that makes sense suspended in mid air.
Every challenge has it’s own unique problems to solve and a students absolutely love working in small groups to find the best solution, often having to revise their strategy several times throughout the task. With more than 25 challenges to choose from, there’s always something new to build each year!
Birmingham Primary School – Scaffolded Robotics program for Grade 3 to 6 – 4 days per level using Spike Prime & Spike Essential
Each level from grades 3 to 6 at Birmingham Primary School engage in a four day program where each class engages in a weekly lesson using the Spike Prime (5/6) or Spike Essential (3/4) system. We run an odd/even year program where we explore different programs, where one year we might explore the robots set up as a rover (driving base) and look at how different sensors and programming might effect change on the robots behaviour. In the alternate year, we look at how the Spike robots can be built into literally anything and everything.
Sessions are broken down into exploring the coding suite and looking at the similarities and differences between the Scratch platform it is based on. We then look at different sensors, how they operate and how they can be utilised in our code. Students are guided on how different blocks work together and how to build efficient programs. We look at mechanisms and how they work, whether that be gears, levers or everything in between. The students are often presented with problems to either solve mechanically or code to debug.
The program is highly engaging and not only scaffolds student learning from week to week, but also builds on their knowledge the following year, especially with the step up from Spike Essential to Spike Prime. We’ve also started a FIRST LEGO League team on the strength of engagement from this program.
Caulfield Grammar – Educational Holiday Program one day event – LEGO build event
This program was a unique blend of educational challenge and holiday fun where we took a few of our regular challenges and made them accessible to a broad age group of approximately 60 students. The great thing about this program is that we not only successfully kept students aged 5 to 12 happily engaged in each task, but they remained so for 6 hours, rolling through 5 different challenges.
Each challenge introduced new skills and emphasised the importance of teamwork. Many of these children hadn’t met each other before, but formed bonds through the universal language of LEGO bricks and the structure of each challenge.
This program follows other fantastic work I’ve done with including being master of ceremonies a their FIRST LEGO League regional competition in 2025.
