Patents on the soles of your shoes...: Lego®

Showing posts with label Lego®. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Oh, patents! Lego® Braille

On September 1, 2023, The Lego® Group launched Lego® Braille sets in English and French, with Spanish, German, and Italian sets available in early 2024 (1). Lego® Braille ushers in a new learning and teaching ecosystem. An ecosystem intended to include all blind or sight-impaired children and their teachers, into the world of Lego® bricks, and through the re-designed Lego® Braille bricks access to the symbolic world of literacy and numeracy.

The development of the Lego® Braille sets brought together a vast network of consultants, special education practitioners, sighted, blind or visually-impaired, in collaboration with The Lego® Foundation, members of the UK, Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), the French National Institute for Blind Youth, and equivalents throughout Europe. Indeed, developing the Lego® Braille sets was also an opportunity to foster vibrant dialogue and collaboration for training and sharing lesson plans. An opportunity to create a teaching and learning community, to ensure the successful implementation and use of the new Lego® Braille sets, for the development of literacy and numeracy, using braille.

Launching of the new Lego® Braille sets thus also comes with the support of the Legobraillebricks.com website. A website that offers lesson plans, shared across the globe, with training videos available via YouTube.

As a result, the new 2023 Lego® Braille sets remain faithful to the original ideas of the 1932 Danish founder of Legos®, Ole Kirk Kristiansen. Original ideas of learning through play, which gave Legos® their name, derived from the portemanteau terms “Leg + Godt”, meaning “play well” in Danish. A magical world of play bricks, which has enchanted children for almost a century, now also finally re-designed for blind children to learn through play. Re-designed bricks for learning braille through play, the tactile language for the blind, developed in France by Louis Braille, in 1824. A tactile language that enables the blind or sight-impaired to read and write.

Lego® Braille bricks are 2 x 4 Lego® bricks, according to the specifications of the original Kristiansen toy brick invention. An invention recited in US3005282, titled Toy building brick, granted on October 24, 1961. However, Lego® Braille bricks have one row of studs completely or partially removed to allow for the remaining studs to be positioned, according to the raised dot formation of the braille code. The braille code comprises 63 combinations for letters, numbers and punctuation marks, in English. Lego® Braille bricks also indicate the braille code in print, on each block, for sighted users. (See images above of the Lego® Braille bricks, and the National Braille Press Engish braille alphabet code.)

Lego® Braille bricks are deemed especially advantageous for children six years of age plus, and children with additional disabilities, because the re-designed bricks are large, and easily manipulated braille letters, numbers and punctuation marks. Indeed, the size and pleasurable manipulation of the bricks offer the possibility of easily combining and recognizing whole words (not only letters), and eventually structuring whole sentences, or computing mathematical operations, directly on the provided Lego® boards. Conversely, special education teachers and practitioners can easily prepare quite sturdy materials, which are also removable and permutable, on the boards. Manipulatives with which children can play, create and learn, without the frustrations, difficulty or limitations of fixed, and much smaller, braille-embossed print.

For anyone (big and small), who has enjoyed endlessly building and re-building with Legos®, this creative pleasure, together with a huge learning bonus, are now accessible to the blind or sight-impaired, unlimited.

Note

(1) Lego® Braille sets are offered to qualified special education teachers and institutions.

References
Lego® Braille Bricks (website)
https://legobraillebricks.com/
Lego® (website)
www.lego.com
Musée Louis Braille - National Institute for Blind Youth (Est. 1785).
https://museelouisbraille.com/en/institut-des-jeunes-aveugles

National Braille Press

https://www.nbp.org/

Ole Kirk Kristiansen

https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/ole-kirk-kristiansen-s-childhood-and-youth/
The Lego® Foundation – Learning through play.
https://learningthroughplay.com/
The Lego® Group
https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/lego-group
United Kingdom Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB)
https://www.rnib.org.uk/

Friday, May 4, 2018

Oh, patents! Lego® Mindstorms® – EPO Award Finalist

Sixty years later, and more than 1000 patients after the first Lego® brick patent was filed in 1958 by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, the Danish Lego® Mindstorm® inventors, Gaute Munch, Erik Hansen and team, are competing for a 2018 European Patent Office Award in the Industry category. In the interim also, The Lego Group Toy Company has also become the third largest toy manufacturer in the world.

Lego® Mindstroms® brings together Lego® brick playworlds and coding for robotics, according to the seminal theories of education and computer use, expressed in the 1980 book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas, written by MIT Professor Seymour Papert, one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab. In other words, Lego® Mindstorms®, launched in 1998, is the culmination of an almost 40-year partnership between the industrial Lego Group R&D and groundbreaking research focused on constructivist approaches to learning and the development of programming languages for children, carried out at the MIT Media Lab.

In the year 2018, the partnership involves the Lego Foundation and the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, where the Lego Foundation has endowed three graduate student fellowships and the Lego Papert Professorship of Learning Research, in honor of Seymour Papert.

The Lego® Mindstroms® inventors, Gaute Munch, Erik Hansen and team, contending for the 2018 EPO Award in the Industry category, produce the robotics kits that have “ignited classrooms” everywhere. An ignition that is fueled by competition since the use of the kits has also promoted the inter-classroom FIRST Lego® League (FLL) tournaments, complete with local, national and international rounds. The teams compete according to elaborate First Lego® League (FLL) tournament rules -- investigating a real-world problem such as food safety or recycling, building a solution, designing and programming a Lego® Mindstrom® robot that competes on a tabletop, and developing team participation skills and ethics.

Thus, participation in the First Lego® League (FLL) tournament program, using Lego® Mindstroms® invokes intensive application and development of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) skills in the classroom, as well as imagination and much creativity, in a fun and energizing context. To date, more than 250,000 students have participated, in 32,000 teams, building 32,000 robots, at 1464 events, in 88 countries!

The Lego® Mindstorm® inventions, enabling children to build and program robots using their computers and/or tablets, remotely connected to an intelligent brick, sensors, beacons and motors, are recited in a series of patents, four of which are cited below:

EP1146941 (A1) ― 2001-10-24 - A remote-controlled toy
EP1148921 (A1) ― 2001-10-31 - A programmable toy with communication means
EP2217341 (A1) ― 2010-08-18 - A toy construction system
EP2032227 (A1) ― 2009-03-11 - A toy building system

The video below shows the accelerated construction of a third-generation Lego® Mindstorm® EV3 robot.

References

Barr, J. (Dec. 19, 2017) MIT’s Lego Legacy: Iconic toymaker supports learning through play

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609588/mits-lego-legacy/

First Lego® League

http://www.firstlegoleague.org/

Lego Mindstorm

https://wwwsecure.us.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms/products/mindstorms-ev3-31313

Papert, S. (1980) Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas.New York, NY: Basic Books.

Papert, S. & I. Harel, Eds (1991) Constructionism: research reports and essays 1985 - 1990 by the Epistemology and Learning Research Group, the Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ablex Pub. Corp, Norwood, NJ.

Papert, S. (1993) The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Papert, S. (1995) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Oh, patents! Lego® (1)

Sixty years ago, the Danish inventor Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, son of the Interlego AG Founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, filed the first Lego® brick patent.

Indeed, the US patent US3005258, titled Toy Building Brick, was filed at the USPTO, on July 28, 1958, and granted on Oct. 24, 1961. The invention offered a novel way of assembling, and most importantly, re-assembling interlocking toy building blocks, alternatively called bricks. The open-faced, rectangular parallelopiped Lego® toy building brick invention thus comprises (to date) interlocking means in the form of protrusions and cavities enabling a clamping engagement of the bricks (see red bricks below). A clamping engagement that can be repeated indefinitely, and in different ways, for the purposes of generating a great many different sorts of play structures and constructions. The bricks were otherwise originally made of plastic and produced using an inventive injection molding process.

The first patent drawing page, containing six of the 12 original patent figures, is included below, respectively showing for :

Fig. 1 - the protrusions (21 and 22), on both sides of the base plate (10), comprising the interlocking system;
Fig 2 - a plan view of a hollow, open-faced rectangular brick, showing how the circular protrusions (21 and 22) fit together within the side walls (11 and 12);
Fig. 3 - a cross-section of the Fig. 2 brick, showing the protrusions on both sides of the base plate;
Fig. 4 - two stacked bricks assembled lengthwise;
Fig. 5 - a cross-sectional view of the Fig. 4, showing how two bricks are stacked and connected lengthwise, and
Fig. 6 - two bricks assembled sideways.