From Play to Participation: How LEGO® Education Enhances Student Engagement in Primary and Secondary Classrooms

“Student engagement in classrooms is reaching a tipping point!”.
This concerning reality, revealed by the State of Engagement Report, has educators across the globe asking the same question: how do we bring back focus and excitement to learning?

Students are losing interest, teachers are losing patience, and traditional methods are losing their grip. But what if the solution was already in our hands—literally?

LEGO Education is proving that with a bit of creativity and a lot of hands-on learning, we can rebuild engagement one brick at a time.

What’s behind the engagement crisis?

The State of Engagement Report, a global survey conducted by LEGO Education, paints a concerning picture of classroom engagement worldwide. Traditional teaching methods often fail to capture the attention of today’s digitally savvy and easily distracted students.

Globally, educators are under pressure to foster critical thinking, teamwork, and creativity. The report highlights that 29% of students globally are underperforming, shedding light on the need for innovative tools that bridge the gap between engagement and learning.

Although discouraging, the battle to capture short attention spans isn’t over. A champion of classroom engagement has arrived. Meet LEGO Education, a brilliant set of tools packed with remarkable resources, combining the excitement of hands-on building with structured learning activities.

How LEGO is turning boredom into brilliance in the classroom

1. Learning by doing

LEGO Education embodies the philosophy of “learning by doing” in a revolutionary way. Research shows students retain more information when actively involved. For example, students can use LEGO bricks to visualise molecular structures, making abstract scientific concepts tangible.

For example, are students struggling to understand molecular structures? They can use LEGO bricks to model atoms, molecules, and even chemical bonds, helping them visualise how atoms and molecules interact.

Red bricks could represent oxygen atoms and white blocks as hydrogen atoms, which students connect to form a water molecule. This hands-on approach helps make abstract scientific concepts more tangible, reinforcing their learning in a memorable way.

2. Collective creativity for better classroom engagement

LEGO is the perfect tool for teamwork. Whether students are building robots or tackling a design challenge, they quickly learn the importance of working together.

In a LEGO project, the first step is often brainstorming ideas. This encourages students to actively listen and share ideas in group discussion, and build a plan of attack.

The great thing about LEGO projects is that they also get students working through problems. Maybe there’s a bridge that keeps collapsing, or a robot refuses to move. These little roadblocks are golden opportunities for students to team up and figure it out together.

As they’re tinkering and sharing ideas, students are honing their problem-solving skills. And do you know what’s the best part? Classroom engagement skyrockets!

3. Bringing STEM to life

LEGO Education sets like SPIKE™ Essentials and SPIKE™ Prime are transforming classrooms globally, helping students engage with STEM subjects through hands-on exploration. These kits align with international curriculums and offer activities tailored to enhance classroom engagement.

For example, LEGO Education's SPIKE™ Essential Set empower students to explore foundational STEM concepts like coding and engineering while creating interactive models. Students can build simple machines such as a spinning Ferris wheel, a lifting crane, or a moving robot. These projects allow them to experiment with forces, motion, and energy in a hands-on, engaging way.

By coding their creations to move, light up, or react to sensors, students not only make abstract concepts tangible but also experience the thrill of bringing their ideas to life.

4. Engaging every type of learner

Every student learns differently. Some are visual learners, others are hands-on, and some might need to hear things out loud to grasp the concept. LEGO Education understands this and provides a fantastic solution.

The beauty of LEGO is its versatility. Students can build, touch, see, and hear as they engage with the material. For instance, LEGO enables visual learners to watch their creations come to life in an array of vivid colours. Imagine students studying the water cycle by building a model of a cloud, a river, and a rainstorm, watching as water “evaporates” from one part of the model to another.

With LEGO, teachers can also design activities and projects that incorporate all three learning styles - visual, kinesthetic, and auditory - within a single lesson.

Take a lesson on architecture, for example. Students might first watch a video (visual learning) on famous structures, then work in teams to design and build their own with LEGO (kinesthetic learning), and finally present their creations and explain their designs to the class (auditory learning).

How to bring LEGO to life in the classroom

Start with the basics

You don’t need to break the bank to bring LEGO into your classroom. Start with a few basic sets. You could use them to teach storytelling by having students build scenes from their favourite books.

For example, you might have primary school students build Jack’s beanstalk from Jack and the Beanstalk, complete with clouds and a giant at the top. For secondary students, you could have them recreate a key moment from The Hunger Games, like the arena layout or Katniss’s tree perch.

Once the scenes are built, students can explain their design choices or even use their creations as props to retell the story, reinforcing comprehension and creativity. At CD-Soft, we have a huge range of LEGO Education sets, tailored to early learning, primary and secondary education.

Explore the magic of LEGO Education kits

If you’re looking to take learning and classroom engagement to new heights, LEGO Education kits like SPIKE Essential and SPIKE Prime are game-changers.

These innovative kits are thoughtfully designed to provide educators with comprehensive lesson plans and activities that seamlessly integrate into global curriculums. Each kit includes step-by-step guides that make it easy to incorporate science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) concepts into everyday teaching.

For example, interested in a hands-on STEM adventure to get students harnessing the power of wind? In this exciting lesson, students become engineers as they design and build a device to measure wind speed using SPIKE Prime.

Through creativity and problem-solving, they’ll explore the science of aerodynamics, experiment with real-world data, and discover how wind power shapes our daily lives.

Spark classroom engagement with LEGO Education challenges

What’s better at promoting student engagement than a little friendly competition? What’s great about LEGO is it taps into students’ natural curiosity. In a learning environment, this can transform an ordinary lesson into an extraordinary one.

By introducing exciting, competitive tasks, like building the tallest tower or constructing a weight-bearing bridge, educators can teach critical thinking, teamwork, and creativity in a way that feels more like play than work.

For example, the "Build the Tallest Tower" challenge is a great way to introduce students to concepts like balance, stability, and center of gravity. For this, divide your students into small groups. Give them a set number of LEGO bricks and a time limit to construct the tallest free-standing tower possible.

Given a set number of LEGO bricks and a time limit, students or groups must construct the tallest free-standing tower possible. Through trial and error, they’ll learn how to distribute weight, create a stable base, and account for forces like gravity.

To make it even more engaging, teachers can simulate real-world conditions by shaking the table, pretending the tower is a skyscraper that needs to withstand an “earthquake.” Not only does this create an engaging lesson, but it also gets the teacher involved, helping to build teacher-student relationships.

Ready to build a brighter future?

If you’re an educator looking to revolutionise your classroom, LEGO Education is your next step. The State of Engagement Report highlights the urgent need for innovative teaching strategies - and LEGO Education delivers!

There’s no better time than now to reignite discovery in your students and bring a new dimension of learning to the classroom. At CD-Soft, we have an extensive range of LEGO Education tools, from hands-on building kits to interactive lessons, to engage and challenge students of all ages.

If you’d like to learn more about our LEGO Education sets, or how it can boost classroom engagement, we welcome you to contact our knowledgeable team.