Since only three schools had been accepted within the Comenius framework though, we had to start with a teachers’ meeting in Belgium to get ourselves organised. We decided to keep the link with Hungary and Italy through eTwinning since they might play a crucial role in developing course material, our ultimate goal. Therefore Hungary joined this initial meeting at its own expense and the pedagogical manager of LEGO/DACTA attended this meeting too.

Immediately afterwards student and teacher communication was started through different ICT channels, one of which the eTwinning platform. The first actual project task was comparing the curricula of all participating countries in order to find a common base for the course material we wanted to develop. We found sufficient similarities for mechanics, electronics and ict. In the mean time we took the opportunity to have the students learn to know each other and each other’s school, country and language. Which in turn led to the starting up of a Comenius website on which all this information could be shared and that could be used as a platform to present our project results. Originally started up by the Belgians, this website has in the mean time been taken over by the Swedish school. Their students have an extensive course in webdesign and managed to smartly “recreate” the site. In the mean time – and with the help of DACTA/LEGO – all schools could acquire sufficient sets of LEGO NXT to study its possibilities. Together with another LEGO set concerning alternative energy, this would make the common LEGO base with which to develop the course material.

Belgium has already developed a theoretical base for the course material in English and has started to develop actual course material as well. This is still in Dutch at present, but about to be translated. Right now Belgium is still doing test runs with this material in the 2nd and 4th form of secondary education. They are also trying to programme the NXT with Labview.

Sweden in the meantime is testing the use of Java for programming. Greece in the meantime got the responsibility to create a full scale test platform that could test our LEGO material. They devised a LEGO Challenge that involved the NXT, but especially paid a lot of attention to the use of solar energy as well. This challenge took place at the beginning of May and proved a real success, both on a social and communicative as on a technical level. The students were divided into transnational groups that consisted of mixed “crews”. One Belgian, one Swede and two or three Greeks had to compete with other similarly composed student groups. Meanwhile we didn’t forget how important the dissemination of our products is.

The LEGO Challenge offered the Greek school excellent opportunities to involve different schools of their own town and education officials from their entire region. The presence of local TV added to this. In Belgium the project has already been presented at different teacher conferences about mechanics, ICT and eTwinning. The main inspectors for mechanics keep in close contact with the project. At the same time Belgium already launched a contest for Flemish primary schools. They are asked to come up with a nice LEGO cat, which can be used as a logo for our project. The winner earns itself a LEGO NXT set. Sweden in turn has specific plans to have their students visit other schools in the neighbourhood to present the project and the use of LEGO NXT.