Battle Over Blocks

RoscoHead writes: "S'pose you've already seen this over at Fast Company - a follow-up to their previous article by Charles Fishman. The follow-up includes comments from three different "users" of Lego - including Hemos, alias Jeff Bates, Slashdot's esteemed Lego guru..."

Comments

New Sets != Death of Imagination

[john@iastate.edu]

Again, I see yet another adult decrying that the new (more than just rectangles) sets are the death of creativity for kids.

As the parent of an eight year old boy who has spent virtually every dime of allowance he has ever received on Logos, I just don't see it.

Sure, roughly 4 nanoseconds after getting it home (only because we banned doing it in the backseat) he has it open and is building it according to the directions -- BUT in a couple of hours he'll have it apart and he'll NEVER build it that way again.

Ya want a battle over bricks?

[Digitalia]

My favorite game in childhood was a true geek's game. We built stuff using Legos and then flung 1" diameter ball barings from siege-engines. You haven't played with legos until you've spent the afternoon building the Ice Planet Deep Freeze Defender and promptly watched it crumble to pieces as the slug of metal hit it. It's even more fun re-designing it to be more structurally sound.

I never really took to Lego

[mj6798]

For "engineering" applications (building things that do things), Lego always seemed to limited to me. And purely for shape and sculpting, it had all the charm of an Etch-a-Sketch: you spent most of the time trying to get around its oddball rectangular limitations.

If you must use a construction set, there seem to be better ones around than Lego: systems like ErectorSet, FischerTechnik, and others, are a lot more flexible and have a lot more interesting mechanical components in them.

But what is wrong with wooden blocks, woodworking, metal working, clay, real electronic parts, solder, or paint? Why learn something as limited, expensive, and plasticky as Lego when you could learn real skills with the real thing? Start off with clay and paint, move on to cardboard and paper, then to light wood, then, well, you get the point. And if parents actually get involved with their children, they can start supervised woodworking and metal work very early.

Long ago on a 32 foot cruising sailboat....

[SwedishChef]

somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, in the confining spaces of a sailboat 32 feet long and 10 feet wide, there was a 3-year-old red-headed girl. This little girl had to herself a bed approximately 2 feet wide and 5.5 feet long. At the foot of the bed was a bookcase whcih contained all the children's books in the knwn universe and from them she learned a love of reading.

But a little red-headed girl does not live by books alone... she needed toys. Toys to make houses, cabins, cottages, kitchens, bedrooms, villages, cars, motorcycles, boats (not many boats, actually), flying machines of unimaginable proportions, castles, dungeons... in short, everything. Where oh where would this little red-headed girl find the room to take along so many toys on such a small sailboat for such a long journey?

Well boys and girls, behind the pillow where her head rested every night was a door; and behind that door was a tiny cupboard; and in that cupboard, resting in the dark where no one else could see (and only she could find it) was the only toy a 3-year-old red-headed girl needed for a 5-year-long journey around the Pacific Ocean on a 32-foot sailboat.

Legos.

And she lived happily ever after.