Lego Education and National Instruments have announced a new product resulting from the two firm's educational collaboration. The kit is a robotic construction kit that is powered by NI LabVIEW software to allow kids to program motion into the robot with drag and drop icons.

The kit is intended to allow students to design robots and then learn basic programming skills. The software is designed to run on cheap classroom notebooks like the Intel Classmate, XO Laptop and other PCs or Macs.

"LEGO Education is proud to continue our ongoing collaboration with National Instruments to provide students as young as seven years of age with a robotics product that actively involves them in their own learning process and promotes creative thinking, teamwork and problem-solving skills -- skills that are essential in the workplace of the 21st century," said Lars Nyengaard, director of innovation at LEGO Education. "By combining the intuitive and interactive interface of LEGO Education WeDo software with the physical experience of building models out of LEGO bricks, we can bridge the physical and virtual worlds to provide the ultimate hands-on, minds-on learning experience."

Via NI