Lego Is the Perfect Toy | Hacker News Reader

Lego Is the Perfect Toy

nymag.com

250 pointswallflower116 comments

I especially love the algebraic nature of LEGOs. Something the designers took care to respect over the years. Many things combine mathematically with so many other parts[1]. Sometimes in twisted ways, sometimes in absurd ways.

- http://www.htxt.co.za/2016/08/08/local-master-builder-shows-...

- http://www.themarysue.com/bendable-lego-geometry/ (tolerance based curvature?)

- http://brickset.com/article/23288/the-geometry-of-the-new-11...

There are a few pdfs listing the linear and angular ratios, can't find them right now. Enjoy your google fu.

ps: for the sheer epicness of it https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/4gmsfp/finished_my_gi...

[1] and as programmers I'm sure you enjoy that ;)

I loved that Lego was even units so you could end up having two things half way across your universe pretty much line up perfectly, or require just a few adjustments.

But the fact that THREE flat pieces equaled a standard height piece drove me nuts as a kid. WHY NOT TWO OR FOUR?

> I loved that Lego was even units so you could end up having two things half way across your universe pretty much line up perfectly, or require just a few adjustments.

This fact is extremely under-appreciated: the Lego system works the way it does because they have attained truly astounding tolerance control in a cheap injection-molding process. I remember a couple of years ago when a small startup promised a Lego-like replacement, but themed for girls. The hype got them plenty of sales, but the poor fit of the pieces meant lots of disappointed customers.

Build quality was part of the thing. As a kid you felt it a little bit. As an adult it makes them a value item. It's not just toy to pretend, it's deeper.

"If you try to 3D print Lego, you get Mega Bloks"

One explanation might be that the flat pieces snap between two top studs on any other brick, when laid on edge. This would not be possible with a different ratio.

Good point! Odd number allows for strong and simple joinery.

LEGO, Lego or lego - I really don't mind, but please don't pluralise it like all the other sheeps!

Nice long-form overview and, from what I can tell, well-balanced trying to deal with legacy / reputation as a "smart toy" and somewhat inconclusive research on the whole. Intuition is a good "out" in this case, because not every toy works for every learning style for every child, etc. One thing I did see:

>Marvin Minsky, the MIT scientist who helped pioneer artificial intelligence, has even said that “the decline of American inventiveness” can be traced to the rise of Lego, arguing that by becoming the most common construction toy, it’s pushed out construction toys like Tinker Toys and Erector sets that can get kids building simple machines.

Whoa, those are some names I haven't seen in a while but did grow up playing with. Tinker Toys in particular. To me, the criticism isn't fair - those were toys and learning tools from a prior generation. I'm pretty sure the only reason I grew up with Tinker Toys was because I had a Grandmother who grew up during the Great Depression and was of the generation that enjoyed them. My Parents much more embraced Legos, and, quite simply, getting bags or bins full of used, miscellaneous bricks at garage sales was a huge creativity boost. Then, later, turn around and sell or donate them. Rarely did I see Tinker Toys or Erector sets around. Technics seemed to bridge the gap between Legos and higher-level engineering / complexity / use of motors.

What does feel important about Legos & playtime, to me, is the manipulation of 3D space, coordination, and dexterity training. There is no such replacement via a 2D screen, and 3D / VR or AR aren't even close. The ROI on play time, age appropriate, with Lego-type hands-on exploration is worth keeping in mind. No batteries. Easy to clean. Hard to break. An Occam's Razor of developmental toys.

Observing my 7yo son's open-ended play with modern-era LEGOs, I must disagree with Minsky. Perhaps the LEGO sets have changed since this this comment was made. I find the current LEGO Technic pieces to be the perfect tool for open-ended exploration, and for building of simple machines. While the sets do come with prescriptive instructions to build something specific out of that set - you aren't forced to follow them. Those instructions are more of a demo of what you can do with the pieces.

The pieces are almost all generic, and closely model their real-world mechanical equivalents -- beams, pins, gears, axels, motors, linear actuators, switches, battery power supplies. There a great book exploring all the technic fundamentals: "Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder's Guide" [1]. It covers concepts like leverage, torque, gears, gear ratios, differentials, suspensions, transmissions, etc.

Throw in the fact that technic electronic components (motors, lights, sensors) can be driven by code (eg. scratch on a rapsberry pi), and I can't imagine a better learning toy which is initially so approachable, and yet has such a high ceiling for advanced learning.

If you want to see what incredible creations are possible in the hands of the masters, check out "Incredible LEGO Technic" [2].

[1] https://www.nostarch.com/technicbuilder2

[2] https://www.nostarch.com/incredibletechnic

Technics are awesome, as a 60 year old engineer I hated to part with the extensive set I had acquired while leading a Lego League team, but I passed it on to my nephew.

However, I see many kids building one model, and then sitting it on a shelf as something they have made. What a waste of Legos...

By contrast I see my 4 year old itching to tear apart any complete Lego model and tear it down to make...planes. Always planes. And rockets.

So let's say I want to use those two books to get started with LEGO Technic (I have long LEGO experience, not so much with Technic), how I find the sets to have use of the books? Should I buy the parts by themselves, after buying the books? Can I find a aggregated set somewhere, where the most common pieces are included?

Basically, how I can find start-sets of LEGO Technic?

See my reply to a sibling comment asking the same question.

In addition to those comments, another option is the Lego WeDo construction set (9580) [1]. Not as many technic parts, but it contains a couple of sensors (tilt/distance), and the USB hub for interfacing with a computer.

You could also just buy a small technic set or two from the toy store (they are all clearly labeled "technic" on the box), but after buying a couple of these, you'll wish you had just bought a single large set for the value for parts.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lego-Education-Wedo-Construction-9580...

NOTE: Same caveat that this set uses the power functions 1.0 plug design, and version 2.0 is upcoming and seems incompatible. Maybe they'll make adapters.

Looks like a nice book. I have zero exposure to legos. Which lego kit should I buy to go along with the book? An amazon link would be very helpful. Thanks.

If you're willing to go all-in, get a big technic set which has the most "power functions" components (motors, remotes, battery box). These are the parts that are harder to come-by unless you order them individually (which is more expensive).

When I looked >= 1-2 years ago, the best single set for spare parts I found was the Volvo L350F wheel loader aka. "42030" [1] (each lego set is uniquely identified by a numeric id). It had the most power functions parts I could find, and probably gives you all the beams, wheels, gears, and other parts you need.

You can supplement your collection with specific parts from places like BrickLink [2] or even the lego.com store [3].

NOTE: Be warned that LEGO is changing their Power Functions plug shape. Most current sets are still on Power Functions 1.0, and new sets will eventually become 2.0

[1] https://www.amazon.com/technic-Volvo-L350F-wheel-loader/dp/B...

[2] https://www.bricklink.com/

[3] https://shop.lego.com/

Out of curiosity, what makes 42030 better than MB Arocs (42043) or Mobile Crane II (42009)? I was just looking for a gift for myself a week ago, and 42043 looks great.

For my purposes I wanted the most parts for the money. Specifically I wanted the power functions parts, since the other parts like beams and wheels will accumulate from every other set. The 42030 had the most power functions parts included. You can see which PF parts are included on the front of the box.

42043: - contains the pneumatic pump & tubes which are less common pieces - this is the only other large technic set I've bought (and I got it mainly for the pneumatic parts)

42009: - Lots of beam parts, but not many power functions parts included.

It's a shame this article didn't come out a few weeks ago, when NoStarch Press had a ton of their Lego books available in a Humble Book Bundle

We've got a 50% off deal running now on all of our print books. And that includes a lot of LEGO books. Coupon code is a the top of the main page.

The page banner says all books, does it include PDFs as well?

I'm not sure if the coupon is good for just ebooks, but you do get ebook versions with the print. I just bought the print Land of Lisp at half price, and got a link to download PDF, Mobi, and ePub versions. I haven't read it yet, obviously, but Paul Graham's review is quoted on the site:

"Turns out the border between genius and insanity is a pretty cheery place."

The generic was part of the appeal. It seems to have peaked in the 90s, now LEGO is milking dedicated shapes. Expected, that's how "progress" evolve. Even my father complains.

> now LEGO is milking dedicated shapes. Expected, that's how "progress" evolve. Even my father complains

I think most of the people who make these complaints simply haven't shopped for Lego in a while and so are operating on a lot of feeling but not much data. Stroll down the Lego aisle(s) at Target, you'll see plenty of free-form sets and traditional pieces like these entire product lines: https://www.lego.com/en-us/classic?icmp=COUSFRClassic and https://www.lego.com/en-us/creator?icmp=COUSFRCreator

It's indeed a reflex based on the new sets I saw since a few years (lots of franchise). I still feel something missing from how sets were designed in the 80s-00s era. Something of that period I miss, half nostalgia, but not only. A balance between surface and simplicity. Kinda like pixel art.

The sets I remember having in the 80s and 90s had lots of custom pieces. My son's Lego seems to have less custom pieces than I remember having when I was growing up. It is amazing watching what he creates after he gets bored of the original creation.

> A balance between surface and simplicity. Kinda like pixel art.

Check out the architecture series: https://www.lego.com/en-us/architecture

They use mostly basic shapes, and not many colors, but I think have found a nice balance between representation & abstraction for the buildings they model.

Another thing going on is, I think their model designers have gotten a lot more skilled at using pieces in novel ways in their models. They've gotten better at representing details, so more details show up.

Good point, they have part of what I mentionned, but these are restricted less playful sets.

They're not playful, I agree, but they're not restricted. They're made up of primarily generic pieces.

When I've looked, there've been dozens of co-branded products and far fewer classics/free-form sets. Some of the bulk brick buckets have been unavailable when I've shopped for my son locally.

But yes, that Creator line is great. I think the 3-in-1 sets especially are very good. My 3-4 yo son loves those. e.g., https://shop.lego.com/en-AU/Vacation-Getaways-31052

Especially when the 3 options are quite diverse; in this case a campervan, a house and a boat. The campervan is particularly clever.

There are definitely a lot fewer Classic sets, but like... the point of them is that they're just a bunch of generic pieces. You don't need that many different sets, just sets of different sizes.

Of course, a just-pieces set of Lego technic would be amazing :-(

They screwed up the formula in the early 2000s, with what is commonly known in AFOL circles as "Juniorization" - lots of big specialized pieces replacing what used to be made out of multiple pieces. Think an entire car chassis, in one piece.

They turned things around again in the late 2000s, and in some cases, have gone a bit too far in the other direction, in my opinion. Some sets are overwhelmed with tiny 1x1, 2x1, etc pieces where larger ones (though still from the basic brick set) would be stronger structurally, and wouldn't inflate the piece count as much.

There's a necessary evolution toward these, to differentiate and "improve" over the past. Maybe before realizing the past was just fine ?

"The past" where LEGO was hemorrhaging money like crazy?

I meant the design mind set, obviously not the financial health of the company. Most people understand the reasons why LEGO did what it did with franchise and new sets.

Yeah, if anything, the peak of "special pieces" LEGO was in the 90s.

If you want to complain about the current direction of lego, at least pick something that's still going on, like lego's increasing commitment to IPs. These used to be all licensed (Star Wars) but now there are a lot of sets that are on lego-owned IPs like Bionicle.

What there is is much less emphasis on traditional lego lines like "city". There is, if anything MORE availability of basic pieces at different prices. Other than size, why would you need lots of basic sets? The point is that they are basic.

Also, inflation adjusted, bulk purchase of lego basic pieces is historically very low right now, because it mostly seems to track the price of raw materials (mainly oil). I'm not 100% sure of this but I read someone making this case with some analysis on one of the lego collector boards.

Anyway, if you like plain, generic lego, this is probably the absolute best time to be into lego: extremely cheap basic lego in the constructor sets, very reasonable priced SPECIFIC lego in the bulk orders, ability to export from lego cad, the best range of technic parts and computer integration of all time...

lego is in much better shape than it was in the dark days of 2001.

the lego price historically: http://www.realityprose.com/what-happened-with-lego/

Previously on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692408

As others have said, this is a constant resounding complaint about modern Lego, and I don't think there's much truth to it right now, if there ever was. I agree that very large, single-purpose piece like large molded rocks or entire wall sections aren't great, but in my experience most of the smaller "dedicated" pieces aren't single-purpose at all, and really encourage creativity.

Personally, if I have a big pile of mostly plain bricks, I tend to make a few generic things like a stick figure and a car and a rocketship and then run out of ideas. But give me a piece with a weird angle, or a bar sticking out of it, or a weirdly-shaped socket, or an engraved texture, and I start thinking, "What else could this be? What could I attach to this and how?"

Online Lego galleries (and official sets!) are full of designs that use apparently single-purpose pieces--handheld items for minifigs like weapons, tools, food, and flowers; larger components like doors, radar dishes, and wheel wells; even minifig limbs that were never even designed to be popped off of the torso or pelvis piece--to build weird new joint assemblies or imply small details or represent all sorts of objects. Limitations foster creativity.

I have very fond memories of playing with both Legos and my Erector Set with my father, growing up. My daughter has both Legos and Tinker Toys. All the "build things with your imagination" toys are fantastic.

Of all the toys that I had as a child, Legos had by far the biggest impact. When I was in college, my mother gave away my "big box of legos" to my cousins. I was, and still am to some degree, devastated. I'm buying legos for my daughter now and its going to be a long time before I can afford to replace what was lost. I still harass my mother about it from time to time (and it's been decades).

Side note: Buying new legos for my daughter, I've come to realize just how much my parents spent on toys for me (and my sister). Even given the fact that the price of legos has increased less (per brick) than inflation, they're expensive. I have dreams of coming upon a great lego stash at a garage sale, so I can jumpstart my daughter's collection and creative "scope". :)

> I have dreams of coming upon a great lego stash at a garage sale, so I can jumpstart my daughter's collection and creative "scope". :)

You can buy Lego by the kg or pound from Ebay. Depending how much cleaning and sorting you're prepared to do you can get some bargains.

You can find some real treasures on Ebay, if you come across some lots where people are selling uncategorized tubs and don't know what they've got. I picked up one lot that had about $500 worth, if you were trying to buy them on BrickLink, of complete, partially disassembled sets for $40.

My grandfather bought me an Erector set, and it was one of the best toys I ever had - but it definitely required a larger investment of time and effort than Lego did. Before you even consider that you need to plan out or follow instructions to build a machine, it just plain takes longer to connect the various pieces, with the fiddly little nuts-and-bolts that you steadily lose over the years anyway.

I have a kid, now, and I definitely look forward to getting to play... or watch someone play... with Erector sets and Lego and all those toys.

edit: Thinking about it some more, Lego is Minecraft, and Erector/Meccano is Kerbal Space Program.

I have to say I agree too. I had a Gabriel(?) erector set and it was the best toy. I enjoyed legos too but the erector set was the most fascinating as it mimicked real things like real cranes or cars (in that they had moving mechanics which obeyed laws of physics and you got to screw things together and took them apart, they were mostly metal so it had less of a "toy" feel as well).

I had a fair amount of Meccano, Lego and a weird thing called Philiform that was apparently a version of Lego created by Philips.

I actually have fondest memories for Meccano - possibly as it was the one I played when I was older. Did used to get upset at my dad "borrowing" bits to help make repairs to cars, greenhouses etc.

>I actually have fondest memories for Meccano

What really hooked me was that they were so well suited for electrical components. Adding gears to the axle and making it turn on its own.

Yeah, I guess Marvin Minsky wasn't aware of Technic and Mindstorms. I largely attribute my "inventiveness" to my childhood obsession with LEGO.

I had Erector set (actually "Meccano"), but preferred LEGO/Technic because they just snapped together, you didn't have to spend time screwing a bunch of tiny nuts and bolts together. The feedback loop was shorter.

I also had some other construction toys like Capsela. I don't think I had Tinker Toys, but they seem much more simplistic.

By middle school Technic were the only LEGO sets I was interested in (unfortunately Mindstorms came later, but I had one of it's predecessors, Technic Control Center).

Prod owner of a capsele too. I didnt have Legos when I was a kid but loved so much my capsela.

I wrote a blogpost about it and the positive effect on my career:

http://joseoncode.com/2012/02/01/capsela-the-game-that-chang...

Original post in hn:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797905

LEGO does have Technic, but it's a small and relatively unpopular subset of the whole universe, hence he may still be right. And the rest of LEGO not only has less of an emphasis in machines, as it also comes with minifigs and other components that can be used for more typical "roleplaying with dolls/action figures" over construction.

Technic and Mindstorms are absurdly expensive compared to TinkerToys, and I think pricier than Meccano.

I don't know that LEGO really pushed out TinkerToys though.

He's right that LEGO is rather inflexible, as far as building structures and mechanisms. You need to mix in non-LEGO materials to build simple machines.

I think one of the under appreciated things about LEGO though is that because they don't actually function as machines, the child's imagination is engaged to do the rest of the leg work. Just like any other mental function, it needs development and exercise too.

Yeah, I guess Marvin Minsky wasn't aware of Technic and Mindstorms

Which would be somewhat amazing, given Mindstorm's pedigree.

That would be amazing considering his relation to Seymour Papert [1], who:

- Co-invented Logo Programming language

- Authored "Mindstorms" [1]

- Collaborated with Lego to produce (Logo-programmable) Lego Mindstorms.

- Was made co-director of the MIT AI Lab by...... Marvin Minsky

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...

I played with Legos extensively when I was a kid (1980s). Overall, they were definitely my favorite, and in fact I kept all of them and now my 4 year old son has them and loves them.

I'm not sure I agree with Minsky, but I have definitely noticed that the Legos of today are very different to the ones I grew up with. Today there is a far, far greater variety of pieces available.

This is definitely a very mixed blessing. On one hand, it does offer a skilled builder many more options, and certainly allows the creation of things that look much better than what could have been created with Legos of thirty years ago. However it also means that finding the right piece takes far more time, which I remember as being the least fun aspect of Legos.

Then there's also the fact that reduced constraints are often not beneficial to the creative process. As a kid, certainly I would have always liked to have had more Legos, but as an adult I realize that an unlimited amount (or, perhaps more importantly, variety) of Legos would probably not have been for the best.

As I kid I loved all the special pieces I could find; they became the centerpiece of most of my designs. Odd enough much of what I built as a kid, I can't build now because my son's large collection of Lego's doesn't include many of cool 80's space pieces. :)

I still have my 80s space pieces (some still in boxed sets) from when I was a kid, so I really enjoyed it when The Lego Movie had the "80s space man" who always wanted to build a spaceship. When I got back from the theater, I built a space ship from those parts (of my own design, in the spirit of the movie.) I'll probably pass them down to grandkids some day. :)

What a nice summary. You write "what does feel important...is the manipulation of 3D space, coordination, and dexterity training..." and I wanted to highlight this versus "making machines" -- Minsky, of course, being a big proponent of machines even for no purpose at all (the delightful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine).

My kid has always enjoyed making shapes in 3D, but not so much the machines part. For 3D manipulation and creativity, she's spent more creative time with Magformers and the magnetic Y-ball and X-ball toys you can find at museum shops, than with Legos.

I think one of the big arguments agains the standard Lego blocks is that you can not build triangles, which is kind of important when building structures.

From what I remember of my childhood Tinker Toys were just low-quality (things would fall apart easily) and weren't as flexible in terms of what you could construct.

Erector, on the other hand, was prohibitively expensive which made it hard to have a meaningful enough collection to build what you wanted.

> and weren't as flexible in terms of what you could construct

The things you made were a lot more abstract, but people have even made computers using Tinkertoys: http://www.retrothing.com/2006/12/the_tinkertoy_c.html (which doesn't excuse the fact that Minsky was flat-out wrong there)

>"Marvin Minsky ... has even said that “the decline of American inventiveness” can be traced to the rise of Lego, arguing that ... it’s pushed out construction toys like Tinker Toys and Erector sets..."

Minsky's not the only person who has come to that conclusion. Tinkertoys were a good match for young boys' sometimes clumsy hands and, for the older more patient boy, Erector sets were a perfect way to spend a solitary rainy day.

Some chemistry professors, students and engineers still work with Tinkertoy-like tools every day.

"the decline of American inventiveness” is assumed without any sort of proof.

http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/10;jsessionid...

Marvin Minsky says LEGO isn't ideal, because you can't build triangles, no pulleys so .. no machines.

Which can only be said of basic Lego. Triangular connections, pulleys and gears are some of the most basic Lego Technic advances - and Technic has existed for 40 years now, though that is maybe slightly too late for Marv's kids to play with them...

I think there are generational technical toys. For example, I think snap circuits are a ridiculously awesome toy for kids.

  there was value to the building experience, the sense of accomplishment, the spatial reading

Toys like this are always so much more memorable--and meaningful.

I made a list of gifts that help people build, hack, create, explore etc [1], would love feedback from HN.

[1] http://wanderkind.org/

My son has a ridiculous bucket of Legos - more than I ever could have dreamed of as a child. I used to spend obscene amounts of money on branded Lego sets when a birthday approached. I soon realized that, while a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle van was really cool (seriously, it was), it only lasted about a day or two before it was reduced to pile of brick rubble and scooped back into the mega-bin. At that stage, the possibility of it ever being reassembled was virtually impossible for a 1st grader to figure out.

The generic pieces were the way to go.

Then, after what seemed like about a year, he started playing with them again. He showed me his long, snake-like sumbaraine with parts of dragon bits here and there which he'd found somewhere in that bin. It was awesome. It was unscripted and creative. It came from his mind, not some 30-paged instruction booklet.

I was more excited to see that kind of creativity than I was the original dragon (which I was made to assemble eons ago). I recently felt a bit jaded about Legos. But my son brought me back.

I still look at most of the modern, themed Lego sets with a sense of sadness. They seem to inspire the "you have to follow the instructions" mentality so apply demonstrated in the father in the Lego movie. The older sets did include instructions, but the older blocks seemed more generic to building a wide variety of things, versus the "this is a piece for the Batmobile engine."

I agree to a point, but unlike other pop-culture tie-in toys, the Batmobile etc. Lego set can be broken down and combined with other bricks. In my experience about half of the themed sets are quickly absorbed into my son's common pool for building other things, while others stay more or less whole (sometimes with some upgrades and repairs). Overall the experience is very good, I think - they are toy which can be mastered (well enough) by children, can build (fairly) durable things, and then recycle cleanly.

Lucky for you Lego still sells tons and tons of sets that are just generic bricks for you to do whatever with: https://www.lego.com/en-us/classic/products and the Lego Creator line which directly emphasizes being able to make a bunch of things with each set: https://www.lego.com/en-us/creator

That was one of the points of this article—people see their themed lines, or their Friends line, and say "why can't it just be like when I was a kid?"—when what Lego said was "why can't we do both, and more?"

Funny, I remember having these complaints 20-25 years ago.

It's more likely the reality is the more specialized blocks come and go, and you only remember the more useful ones that survive the generations. There were junk pieces back then too.

It's kinda like saying "all music nowadays is trash, not like the old days". Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is trash, and you only remember the best parts of the past.

How modern is 'modern'?

When I was a child, the sets I received usually had some sort of theme, even if it wasn't a branded theme. Pirates, space, race cars, whatever. Also, as other articles have pointed out, the majority of the specialized-looking pieces in modern, branded models, are actually creative re-uses of pre-existing pieces. Re-contextualization.

One thing I remember distinctly is that my sets always came with two sets of instructions - one would build the model featured on the box, the other would use a subset of the same parts to build something related but different. Personally, I would usually build the intended model, play with it a bit, then disassemble it for the alternate model. Eventually that would get disassembled as well, added to the big box of unsorted Lego, and would be fodder for modeling some other random idea.

That said, I think I did more experimentation with the Technic line of Lego, which is more like a plastic erector set, than I did with the regular bricks. At least, I remember more of the experimentation with those, probably because it was at a later point in my childhood.

I'd do roughly the same. I would build and play with the main model, perhaps the secondary designs if they looked like fun. Then I'd break it down and use the pieces for whatever I felt like at the time.

But then roughly once a year I would break down everything I'd built and sort every piece. Then I'd rebuild all the original models.

Funnily I have trouble swallowing medication, but I once put a flat 1x4 piece in my mouth for storage, but accidentally swallowed it. After that I'd always be bummed out when building my fire truck because it would be missing a piece. Back then in the 80's you couldn't get replacement pieces (at least where I lived).

Well even the older sets (25 years ago for me) had some specific pieces for boats, castles, space craft, etc.

But you could still make your bat mobile engine something else, if you let your imagination run wild during a building process.

I stopped buying Lego for a while because that's what it felt like to me, too. But a LOT of the newer sets now are built with very generic pieces. Each set might contain a unique piece or two.

Also, I've noticed that my kids (<8yo) both get new Lego, build following the instructions, then within minutes they will be moving pieces around to better suit their style. Or completely destroying it and making something they want to build instead.

You are allowed to throw away the instructions.

Your opinion is common, but it reflects a waning creativity of a person growing older, not a major change in LEGO

Thats somewhat true. But my kids always build the themed project first, play with it, then bust it apart and the pieces are merged into the greater pool for general builds. My kids come up with some crazy uses for those specialized blocks!

The instructions in the older sets are also noticeably harder than the instructions are now. The new sets probably have, on average, four or five times as many steps, for the same number of pieces. And forget about listing which new pieces are used in each step, or showing multiple angles to help illustrate the alignment - you'd better be really good at counting studs in the isometric renderings on some of the old instruction sets.

Perfect toy indeed, and I'm glad to see how they've captured the girl's market with the Friends and related series. Lego had attempted to market to girls several times before 2012 but failed. I appreciate how this interview spoke to the specific outcome of their market research, i.e. the larger, more detailed figures. It must have been crazy to suggest to Lego that they abandon the "minifig" format for a major new product line, but it turns out that's exactly what they needed to do.

My own family experience is reflective: my daughter enjoyed building Lego sets (and got quite good at it) but didn't really engage with playing with them until the Friends sets came out. With Friends she can spend hours creating a huge narrative about their adventures. Now you can't find a coffee table in our house that doesn't have a couple Lego sets on it. And when other girls come over to play, they're drawn like magnets straight to the Legos.

A bit ironically, the 'Larger, more detailed figures' is is actually something Lego had already done, in boy-centered sets, several years before.

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/TECHNIC_Figure, http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/8714_The_LEGO_TECHNIC_guys

I'm a bit disappointed they didn't use the same design (or a similar one) for the new figures - there was a lot to be said for the full posability of the Technic figures.

Also, the legs had holes in the side, allowing you to mount bricks either on their feet, or to the side of their legs. This allowed for building reasonably convincing exo-suits.

Very interesting to get your perspective, re: what they studied, deployed, and you observed. Nice to hear success stories. Habits and 'tradition' can be tough to adjust or break, but when it works, quite cool. The "creating a narrative" is awesome, as in a lot of development research I reviewed for some studies, because that's how 'play' and development seem to grow naturally. Acting out. Imagining stories. Not the end-all be-all of things - but a noteworthy component.

Yep, Friends is an example of the success of research, product development, and commitment over status quo. LEGO's research showed them that many girls wanted characters with names (Sophia, Emily, Sherrie, etc.) not mini-figures with roles (firefighter, policewoman, robber). Friends gives them that.

Just some x y work but i think some here might enjoy the nostalgia

400k+ 2x2 Lego bricks pixel wall http://imgur.com/a/X5fHS

Wow, where is that?

In a 36m x 2,75m hallway http://www.alr.lu/

One thing that really annoys me about lego, is that lego mindstorms kits are still relatively expensive despite tech improving. It is hard for most parents to justify this costs on a toy. In fact, the price has gone up with time rather than decreasing as would be expect. The newer kits are more expensive than the older kits by about $40 when adjusted for inflation.[0][1] Sure, the new kits feature an arm processor that runs linux and has bluetooth, but these things have gotten cheap.

I am somewhat surprised the chinese haven't started making counterfeit smart bricks with the same capability.

[0]http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/9747_Robotics_Invention_System [1]http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/31313_Mindstorms_EV3

The lament over price and overly specialized parts is misplaced. Price per piece has not changed much, and there have always been specialized pieces in sets.

While I've seen the trend of more kids just following the instructions (vs free-building from their imagination), the pieces still provide a lot of opportunity for creativity.

Even better, Lego released their free Lego Digital Designer (LDD) software, which is a CAD-like program where you can build in 3d using the entire catalog of Lego pieces. It opens up many more creative possibilities.

For example, using LDD, I was able to design my own take on the A-Team van.

https://ideas.lego.com/projects/160590

On the Lego Ideas website, customers can submit designs, and the Lego company will consider making them into official sets... Yet another way to stimulate creativity.

My parents like to tell the story of when I got my first Lego set--the first thing I did was pull out the instruction booklet (with all the diagrams of 'models you can make') and put it in the trash, with the explanation "I don't need instructions." Most of what I wound up building with them was 'world of the Future' models, which demonstrated some vision of an ideal society. For example, I had a model street with some storefronts, and overhead wiring to support small single-person electric scooters which would run on the sidewalk alongside the pedestrians, and would be docked at special stations for the next person who needed them. (I struggled with designing an automated system to automatically redistribute them as necessary, using only relay logic which is what I understood at the time.) Another model was what I now recognize as a 'smart home', which featured occupancy detection, a (wired) telephone remarkably similar to Apple's 1983 concept phone[1] based on the Macs we had in our house at the time and an Apple Newton I had seen, and various other concepts (again, all based on relay logic and desktop computers!)

Bear in mind that I was doing all of this when I was 10. Clearly this was not normal play amongst my peers, and I would not expect Lego to provoke this sort of thing in most people. However, it was for me a valuable tool in building a worldview which I still strive for today.

My point in mentioning all this is that the great virtue of Lego is that it can be used for pretty much anything. Even if you get a set which is intended for "conflict play," it can be repurposed by the recipient to match whatever it is they're most interested in. (It's sort of like an inverse of the short story The Toys of Peace[2] in that regard.)

[1]: http://www.mactrast.com/2011/12/apples-was-working-on-a-touc...

[2]: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ToysPeac.sh...

Perfect timing, I've just ordered the three big Technics sets from 2016.

Technics is brilliant, even if my enjoyment with it is currently limited to following the instructions. I hope that it'll teach my kids a lot about engineering. The gear boxes in the big sets for example are genius.

For xmas I asked my mom to mail me my old Mindstorms sets (original yellow brick version). I want to share them with my 2 year old, who is already into Legos. I absolutely loved those things.

I have a fun memory of the yellow Mindstorms set.

Apparently, the visual programming environment was just a thin wrapper on top of C, and people quickly came out with simple IDEs that let you program the brick in C.

I tried to program a musical sequence, and was mystified when programs involving simple decimals didn't work. I didn't understand at the time, but the Yellow Brick didn't have any floating-point support! I eventually just faked it with a good-enough approximation of using integers to emulate fixed-point arithmetic.

Tell that to my feet when my kids leave them in the middle of the family room at night!

Legos are amazing and are definitely the focal point of my kids (age 5 and 9) creative play.

During my childhood (80s) I only cared about 3 toys: lego, playmobil and zx spectrum. All the rest was crap.

I often try to explain the appeal of programming to the uninitiated by saying it's a bit like building Lego models but you have an almost infinite supply of blocks.

From the article: "What he noticed was that they now play with physical Legos as if they were the video game, reenacting their races with the plastic pieces. This isn’t to say that Legos aren’t still good toys, or that there’s anything necessarily wrong with imaginary play mimicking the experience of a video game, but it’s certainly different from what most parents imagine they’re buying in a box of Legos. The question is whether that difference matters."

Not only does the difference not matter, I'm not sure I believe that there is a difference. When kids play, they're acting out variations on stories they've encountered. I don't see a real difference between performing scenes from a video game and performing scenes from a book, movie, TV show, or real life.

Worth mentioning the CEO credited with the turnaround announced his retirement (to the board) this week.

As far as I understand, a Lego parent company is getting set up (Lego Brand Group) and Knudstorp will be head of that company, while Lego itself will switch focus on just the brick themselves (a bit like the recent Google->Alphabet restructuring).

Source: http://www.brothers-brick.com/2016/12/06/lego-names-new-ceo-...

Try stepping on it and you'll quickly discover its flaw.

I remember playing with a really old version of Technic as a kid. This was probably one of my favorite toys. I would build all sorts of interesting machines with the gears.

I saw another mention of a raspberry pi driving Technic on here. Has any tried this?

Yes. Raspbian comes with a version of Scratch which has out-of-box support for LEGO WeDo/PowerFunctions.

If you get the Lego USB hub part (9581), you can attach Power Functions v1.0 components to your raspberry pi via the hub. Works right away. The USB hub has two channels, so you can use it to control 2 motors, 1 motor + 1 sensor, or 2 sensors.

The LEGO extension to Scratch has controls like:

- Set Motor (A or B or both) to speed 0-100

- Turn Motor (A or B or both) on for x seconds

- Stop Motor ...

- Reverse Motor Direction

- Read tilt/distance sensor value

I've also worked out the IR codes (with the help of others' work) so if you hookup an infrared led to your pi and install LIRC you can imitate the Power Functions remote controls.

There are some really cool examples of people building working printers with Technic pieces and Mindstorms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yZpAMWU1s8

One of the best toys I've seen are "snap circuits", which are basically one of those simple electronic lab kit "toys" only that they do not use cables. Instead you snap blocks together like legos.

Lego power functions is exactly this (but for very limited circuits). There are battery boxes for power, switches (both mechanical, and remote-controlled), lights, motors, etc.

The power functions pieces have special bricks which embed electrical endpoints which click together when the bricks are connected. The system is basically 4 wires - 2 which propagate the power rails to downstream pieces, and 2 more wires which are for PWM controlling of motor spin rate.

I would love it if they added more electronic components to this set (eg. timers, sounds, more sensors, etc). If you like to tinker, you can cut apart these wires and hook up the control wires to an raspberrypi-controlled circuit.

There's probably even more circuits possible with Mindstorms components, but I'm not familiar enough w/ Mindstorms to comment.

Legos did that too! I had a spaceship and a boat in which a battery was connected to lights and a siren via bricks.

Lego is a near-perfect toy. Anyone who claims it is perfect has not stepped on one barefoot in the dark.

After a few times you consider crawling across the floor probing the floor before you as if you were Rambo in a minefield.

Agreed, Lego is fantastic, and timeless.

I have 6yo and 1yo daughters and one thing that strikes me with the current Lego range Vs the sets I had as a kid is the amount of rubbish decorative tiny parts that the most recent sets include.

(I know you can still buy the basic box full of bricks, but these are sometimes hard to find)

The only thing that is sad is superhero themes. There are much better stories out there.

Yup, perfect toy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXgB3lIvPHI

We have a few LEGO books that make people think.

https://www.nostarch.com/lego

Legos are dope as fuck.

Isn't this just an ad?

I wish they would bring back some of the classic themes. There is kind of a hole right now, as there isn't a real Castle theme, a real Pirate theme, and Space has been subsumed into the Star Wars licensing for almost two decades.

One thing I've always really wanted was a modular castle line, akin to the modular town building series, e.g. https://shop.lego.com/en-US/Pet-Shop-10218

Holy crap "modular castles" would be ideal for the Lego Ideas website.

It's nuts that they haven't done it already. The late 80s, early 90s crusaders/falcon knights/black knights sets could be put together in something approaching what I'm envisioning, but it was underdeveloped. The Medieval Market Village and Kingdoms Joust sets were natural jumping-off points for a modular castle system.

Yes

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