Video: National Instruments, Lego expand collaboration

AUSTIN, Texas — National Instruments said it is expanding its collaboration with Lego Education through a new classroom robotics platform announced during a company event here this week.

The WeDo platform will be powered by National Instruments' LabView icon-based environment. Students ranging in age from 7 to 11 will use it to program their own robots.

Students will program up to 12 Lego robots. Eleven-year-old Sarah Almgren exhibited her skills here by programming a Lego monkey to thump drums at three different speeds set to three musical beats.

WeDo software operates on the Intel Classmate PC running Windows XP, the One Laptop per Child XO running the Linux OS as well as on PCs supporting Windows XP or Windows Vista (32-bit) and Macs running Apple Macintosh 10.5.

"Our collaboration with Lego Education has leveraged the strength of both companies to deliver our third educational robotics toolset in the past 10 years," said Ray Almgren, National Instruments' vice president of academic relations.

Lego's WeDo will be available in January 2009.

Engineers and researchers gathered here participated in a variety of robotics and autonomous vehicle demonstrations. (see video.

Brian West, a summer intern at National Instruments, demonstrated his autonomous project, which took five weeks to complete following a six-week course on the LabView graphical programming language.

Anu Saha, product marketing manager for the company's robotics group, demonstrated a prototype robot his team developed using Compact RIO modules as part of the FIRST competition.