My lego obsession began around the time I was around 10, I distinctly remember constructing a police van & a gas station providing for an amazing build and hours of play later. I also remember an incredible Airport set that my friend had. Just thinking of it gives me joy.
Today as an adult I still have fun building legos. Lego provides a model to see the world. When you see an object like a car, an airplane or even a city, you think about it in terms of building blocks. What building blocks is something made of?
Lego teaches you to build an object one brick at a time. The steps are tedious in larger builds but seeing a goal of where you are headed, it’s exciting to combine bricks into a part & then parts into a larger object. Building lego is a very physical act, it forces you to work with your hands. Thats deeply satisfying to me.
Building Lego is an immersive experience and you can find yourself in a flow, you have to pay attention or risk getting a wrong part in or missing a step. A process which may derail your build if the error is discovered late. Lego teaches patience & dealing with consequences of being wrong.
Lego when built with family or friends is a social act. Divide and conquer the build & also use it as a teaching moment when done with little ones.
The Technics are great showing gear movements and its fantastic to see the gears moving in harmony, whether it be to move a lever or retract wheels in an airplane. Each time I’m on an airplane when the landing gear is deployed or retracted I think about the gear mechanism I built in my cargo plane.
Separately, There is nothing more motivating that seeing an unfinished lego build. Once the build starts it must be completed.
My most recent builds have been lego trains. Trains offer complexity and a never ending canvas. You can keep adding tracks, trains & switch tracks. I started out with a cargo train & ended up with 2 more that I love to run on my ever expanding tracks.
Then I discovered that the power units for the trains were programmable with a simple visual programming language like MIT scratch. There is also a option to program lego in python called pybricks. So you can make the thing you built do something. The unit that controls the motor is programmable and so I’ve been building robot trains that avoid collisions, stop & go based on seeing certain bricks. This entailed getting special color & distance sensors
In building lego the journey is the destination with the most joy derived during the build. Building Lego is a creative act in the physical world & that is why I love lego. I’d love to learn about your experience with lego or similar toys?
Thinking about software, life, the universe and everything. 