photo credit: tantek.com

I believe that Legos are one of the best toys that people (particularly kids) can play with.  They’re so wonderfully simple, yet combined together can be amazingly complex.  Kind of like how life works – you have all these microscopic cells that combine to create life.  The sum of the parts is greater than the whole, right?  When you start putting a lot of things together, it’s not as simple as addition – it’s more like multiplication, where things get more and more complex as there are more units of whatever that are interacting with each other.

Now Legos don’t get quite so complicated, but they certainly do lend themselves to an endless variety of structures!  Using these little building blocks, you can make robots and houses and animals and faces.  Really, whatever you are creative enough to conjure up in your imagination, you can find a way to represent it using Legos.  I love that they’re very plain and the beauty that arises from them can only be got through creative thinking.  It encourages people to think.

See, you’ve got these parameters.  You only have square and rectangular blocks.  They can only stack on each other.  The fewer circles you overlap to put them together, the less stable that connection.  There are only a handful of generally primary colors to work with.  That’s pretty much it.  Then you’re let loose into a world full of designs that can fill up your head.  These are the kind of toys that challenge kids while making it fun.  That’s why I believe in the earliest versions of these lovely toys.  The crazy designs that have come out since then take the creative fun out of the user’s side and puts it into the manufacturer’s side.  Now it’s people who work for the company that come up with cool things and shapes are made to fit that.  Not as exciting as finding out how to make something look like that with the given (limited) resources.  It has become more about aesthetic appeal than mental appeal now.

However, I will say that those new designs can still teach kids something.  I’ve often self-taught myself skills and I find that when that happens, you lose out on the “tricks of the trade.”  So rather than having to figure it out yourself, if you first follow instructions and build exactly what is mapped out for you, you can learn the methodologies behind how to create such a thing.  I can imagine if you got one of those pre-designed versions of Legos and tried to build it just by looking at the end result, you’d find yourself with pieces in the wrong place, missing pieces, or leftover pieces.  If you take that first time as a process-learning experience, then take that and start making your own things from that structural knowledge, I’d say that was still time and money well-spent.  I’m just afraid that nothing will be learned, except how to read and follow instructions.

Besides, there’s nothing quite like the mindless fun of putting blocks together without the pressure of creating something beautiful.  With plain blocks, there’s that freedom.  With strange ones that are meant to be something else, it’s not as fun to mess around and let your mind wander.  You never know what you may come up with and what you can learn in the process!