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How smart, affordable policy could revolutionize Jamaica's tech education:
1. Partner with Lego Education to create the Lego Jamaica Education Project (the branding alone is simple & brilliant double entendre)
2. Lego is a Danish company...the Danes are quasi-socialists and generally open to assisting developing countries and want to promote their products .... so the Danish govt should be involved
3. Jamaica puts up some seed money for Lego tools and training assets purchased at cost. The Danes match our input with some cash or kind.
Jamaica can easily find US $10-15 million from the Universal Access Fund or impending spectrum sale (downsize that tablet giveaway boondoggle please)
4.With US$30-$40 million in inputs Jamaica can build model Lego Education tech programs in 200-300 basic, primary & secondary schools within 5 years...eventually creating a tech-literate cohort of students to start building on Jamaica's base tech capacity
5. Create modern competitions for primary & secondary schools emphasizing battles with programmable machines or CAD or software built by students
6. Lego corporate and Jamaica can use this Project and Jamaica's global brand recognition to promote the Lego Jamaica model around the world... creating a virtuous circle of benefits for both. Jamaica gets a higher profile as a country serious about educating its workforce for the 21st century (and will attract more investment in education as a result)... and Lego corporate gets huge promotion for their products especially in the developing world.
We need less yappin' and more doin'
Could anything be simpler??
How Lego Is Constructing the Next Generation of Engineers
With programmable robots and student competitions, Lego is making “tinkering with machines cool again”
By Franz Lidz
Smithsonian magazine, May 2013, Subscribe
Lego’s new Mindstorms EV3 kit lets users build 17 different robots and program them directly through an “intelligent brick.” (Ian Allen)
The toy company has supplied the world with more than 600 billion tiny plastic bricks—about 80 for each inhabitant of the Earth.
Explore more photos from the story
There are no ballpoint grenade pens, no wrist-mounted dart guns, no Aston Martins tricked out with smoke screens, bulletproof glass, revolving license plates or ejector seats. Still, the geek-approved contraptions at Lego’s research-and-development facility in Billund, Denmark, are as covetable as anything cooked up by Q Branch.
Q Branch, of course, is the section of Her Majesty’s Secret Service (MI6) that supplies James Bond with fanciful gadgetry. The headquarters of MI6 is a ziggurat-like fortress known within the intelligence community as Legoland. It gets its name from the toy company that has supplied earth with more than 600 billion tiny plastic bricks—about 80 for each inhabitant. The Lego company’s own HQ is a modest campus as neat and well-ordered as a quadratic equation. Huge colored bricks—a corporate nod to art—lie scattered in tidy piles, and simple rectangular buildings bear names like Idea House and Head Office.
Lego’s own MI6, its top-secret R & D lab, is on the second floor of a drab brick structure called the Tech Building. Inside, gearheads in jeans and fleece pullovers are surrounded by enough electronic ganglia to jump-start Frankenstein’s monster. Amid a spaghetti of wires and a blaze of red, green, blue, yellow and purple blocks is an amazing array of robot prototypes, all capable of exasperating behavior. Some of these marvels propel themselves on Lego wheels; others skitter around on Lego legs. There’s a scorpionlike robot that turns sharply, snaps its claws and searches for an infrared beacon “bug.” There’s a Mohawked android that flings little red balls as it rumbles. And there’s a fanged robot snake that, with the wave of a smartphone, shakes, rattles and rolls. Dangle your cell in front of the serpent’s head and it lunges to bite you.
All three gizmos are characters in Mindstorms EV3, the latest update of a do-it-yourself kit that enables budding Edisons to assemble robots, program them on PCs and Macs, and control them via Bluetooth, downloadable apps and voice commands. Like any other Lego, Mindstorms EV3 is a jumble of parts (nearly 600 separate elements) that can be plugged together many ways. The toy, which clocks in at $350 and will be in stores this fall, comes with 3-D interactive building instructions for 17 different bots that walk, talk and stalk. And, this being Lego, enterprising kids are encouraged to hack away and turn the components into whatever they can dream up.
***
Once upon a time, teachers lacked the tools to excite and engage pupils in engineering. And the technological know-how required to put together a juddering robot limited the audience to high-school and university students. That all changed in 1998 when Lego launched its first wave of programmable bots. By the second wave, in 2006, the programming language had become visual and kids could make bots do pretty much anything simply by stringing directives together on a computer. “Today a second grader can make her own wall-avoiding triceratops in 20 minutes,” says Chris Rogers, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University.
With bricks, action and hues as vibrant as tropical sunsets, Lego created a way for novices to learn the basics of structural engineering: bracing, tension and compression, loading constraints, building to scale. By combining Lego bricks to sensors, servo motors and microprocessors, those novices can now explore everything from basic pulleys and belts to computer programming. “Mindstorms EV3 makes tinkering with machines cool again,” says Ralph Hempel, author of Lego Spybiotics Secret Agent Training Manual.
Mindstorms encourages young tinkerers to play their way into robotics. “It puts no limits on your fantasies,” says Niels Pugholm, a Danish college student who’s been playing with Legos from the time he was old enough to know he shouldn’t swallow them. “Most toys pre-tell a story; Mindstorms is exploratory and has no set rules. If I construct a Mars rover robot, I can rebuild it into a robotic arm and then a robotic humanoid. Lego robotics is a sneaky educational way to learn about design, planning, construction and, most importantly, reconstruction.” In Denmark, he says, it’s obligatory for a child to build a Babel Tower out of Legos that “inevitably gets demolished.”
1. Partner with Lego Education to create the Lego Jamaica Education Project (the branding alone is simple & brilliant double entendre)
2. Lego is a Danish company...the Danes are quasi-socialists and generally open to assisting developing countries and want to promote their products .... so the Danish govt should be involved
3. Jamaica puts up some seed money for Lego tools and training assets purchased at cost. The Danes match our input with some cash or kind.
Jamaica can easily find US $10-15 million from the Universal Access Fund or impending spectrum sale (downsize that tablet giveaway boondoggle please)
4.With US$30-$40 million in inputs Jamaica can build model Lego Education tech programs in 200-300 basic, primary & secondary schools within 5 years...eventually creating a tech-literate cohort of students to start building on Jamaica's base tech capacity
5. Create modern competitions for primary & secondary schools emphasizing battles with programmable machines or CAD or software built by students
6. Lego corporate and Jamaica can use this Project and Jamaica's global brand recognition to promote the Lego Jamaica model around the world... creating a virtuous circle of benefits for both. Jamaica gets a higher profile as a country serious about educating its workforce for the 21st century (and will attract more investment in education as a result)... and Lego corporate gets huge promotion for their products especially in the developing world.
We need less yappin' and more doin'
Could anything be simpler??
How Lego Is Constructing the Next Generation of Engineers
With programmable robots and student competitions, Lego is making “tinkering with machines cool again”
By Franz Lidz
Smithsonian magazine, May 2013, Subscribe
Lego’s new Mindstorms EV3 kit lets users build 17 different robots and program them directly through an “intelligent brick.” (Ian Allen)
The toy company has supplied the world with more than 600 billion tiny plastic bricks—about 80 for each inhabitant of the Earth.
Explore more photos from the story
There are no ballpoint grenade pens, no wrist-mounted dart guns, no Aston Martins tricked out with smoke screens, bulletproof glass, revolving license plates or ejector seats. Still, the geek-approved contraptions at Lego’s research-and-development facility in Billund, Denmark, are as covetable as anything cooked up by Q Branch.
Q Branch, of course, is the section of Her Majesty’s Secret Service (MI6) that supplies James Bond with fanciful gadgetry. The headquarters of MI6 is a ziggurat-like fortress known within the intelligence community as Legoland. It gets its name from the toy company that has supplied earth with more than 600 billion tiny plastic bricks—about 80 for each inhabitant. The Lego company’s own HQ is a modest campus as neat and well-ordered as a quadratic equation. Huge colored bricks—a corporate nod to art—lie scattered in tidy piles, and simple rectangular buildings bear names like Idea House and Head Office.
Lego’s own MI6, its top-secret R & D lab, is on the second floor of a drab brick structure called the Tech Building. Inside, gearheads in jeans and fleece pullovers are surrounded by enough electronic ganglia to jump-start Frankenstein’s monster. Amid a spaghetti of wires and a blaze of red, green, blue, yellow and purple blocks is an amazing array of robot prototypes, all capable of exasperating behavior. Some of these marvels propel themselves on Lego wheels; others skitter around on Lego legs. There’s a scorpionlike robot that turns sharply, snaps its claws and searches for an infrared beacon “bug.” There’s a Mohawked android that flings little red balls as it rumbles. And there’s a fanged robot snake that, with the wave of a smartphone, shakes, rattles and rolls. Dangle your cell in front of the serpent’s head and it lunges to bite you.
All three gizmos are characters in Mindstorms EV3, the latest update of a do-it-yourself kit that enables budding Edisons to assemble robots, program them on PCs and Macs, and control them via Bluetooth, downloadable apps and voice commands. Like any other Lego, Mindstorms EV3 is a jumble of parts (nearly 600 separate elements) that can be plugged together many ways. The toy, which clocks in at $350 and will be in stores this fall, comes with 3-D interactive building instructions for 17 different bots that walk, talk and stalk. And, this being Lego, enterprising kids are encouraged to hack away and turn the components into whatever they can dream up.
***
Once upon a time, teachers lacked the tools to excite and engage pupils in engineering. And the technological know-how required to put together a juddering robot limited the audience to high-school and university students. That all changed in 1998 when Lego launched its first wave of programmable bots. By the second wave, in 2006, the programming language had become visual and kids could make bots do pretty much anything simply by stringing directives together on a computer. “Today a second grader can make her own wall-avoiding triceratops in 20 minutes,” says Chris Rogers, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University.
With bricks, action and hues as vibrant as tropical sunsets, Lego created a way for novices to learn the basics of structural engineering: bracing, tension and compression, loading constraints, building to scale. By combining Lego bricks to sensors, servo motors and microprocessors, those novices can now explore everything from basic pulleys and belts to computer programming. “Mindstorms EV3 makes tinkering with machines cool again,” says Ralph Hempel, author of Lego Spybiotics Secret Agent Training Manual.
Mindstorms encourages young tinkerers to play their way into robotics. “It puts no limits on your fantasies,” says Niels Pugholm, a Danish college student who’s been playing with Legos from the time he was old enough to know he shouldn’t swallow them. “Most toys pre-tell a story; Mindstorms is exploratory and has no set rules. If I construct a Mars rover robot, I can rebuild it into a robotic arm and then a robotic humanoid. Lego robotics is a sneaky educational way to learn about design, planning, construction and, most importantly, reconstruction.” In Denmark, he says, it’s obligatory for a child to build a Babel Tower out of Legos that “inevitably gets demolished.”
...wi need a Programming Island 
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