CONWAY — For using Legos in innovative elementary-level engineering classes, John Heffernan, who lives in Conway and teaches technology and engineering at Williamsburg’s Anne T. Dunphy School, was named one of Lego’s 110 “Master Educators” this year.
Legos are useful for teaching, Heffernan said, because most students are already familiar with them, and they “allow kids to quickly create prototypes of structures and vehicles and so forth.” He uses Legos for robotics projects that increase in complexity from kindergarten through sixth grade. In fourth grade, for example, the students design a robotic burglar alarm in a Lego house, with sensors that detect “when a Lego minifigure burglar comes in,” Heffernan said.
“In the old days of engineering, they never did that,” he said. “You just learned math and science forever, then maybe by the time you were a senior in college, maybe you would actually design something. So engineering education has changed that way. We’re trying to start earlier and get more kids interested.”
This is the first year that Lego has run its “Master Educators” program. About five years ago, Heffernan said, Lego had a similar program that he participated in as well. The program gives its 110 educators a network to exchange ideas. Lego also uses them as a “sounding board” for new products and educational programs. In June, Lego brought the members of the program to Chicago for the annual conference of the International Society for Technology in Education, where Heffernan met with Mitchel Resnick, who developed a programming language to make it easier for kids to learn computer programming.
Heffernan worked as an engineer before becoming a teacher in 1992. He designed electronic equipment for the military, and later designed software. He has been in the Williamsburg school system for 12 years and taught third grade in Amherst before that. In 2013, Heffernan published a book called “Elementary Engineering: Sustaining the Natural Engineering Instincts of Children.” Most of the book, he said, gives lessons for an elementary robotics curriculum.
“With Lego projects, there’s two kinds: ones that have step-by-step directions, and ones that don’t,” Heffernan said. “So I provided more of those open-ended projects that don’t necessarily have one answer, where kids have to engineer their own.”