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

Lego User

[webword]

CmdrTaco confession at rehab Clinic: "Yeah man, I, uh, frequently use Lego blocks. No, man, no, I am not addicted. Just, ah, just give me one more. Just one more block. Yeah, yeah. Yes. No. I, ahh, mean it. I need one more block. Look at this Linux box I almost built! One more block will do it. If I don't close that hole, they'll get root! Pleeeaze. I need one more block. Fine. Uh, fine. You've got me by the balls. One more block and I promise I won't post any more Katz...."

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.

Re:New Sets != Death of Imagination

[Peter H.S.]

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

I remember the same complaints in the late 70's. And, I am ashamed to admit, I too, was once complaining about that.

I guess that ones own "golden Lego moments" are frozen with the sets and bricks available at the time. What comes after, seems like follies, and crass commercialism.

I do think that Lego is expensive, especially because the rule about "quantity is a quality in itself", is so true about Lego. Lots of bricks is lots of fun. There is also a certain "critical mass of bricks" needed for many continouse hours of zen-like Lego constuction and play time.

On the other hand, I also think that stuff like Lego are really great toys, far superior to so much else. If for nothing else, because Lego pieces tend to very tough (oh, all the "glittering" plastic trash toys I used to own, who could not withstand even a low intensity afternoon war in my bedroom;)

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.

He, he, the frantic art of backseat assembly of Lego sets.

A woman in the one of the articles, is worried because her son only assembles the kits and never take them apart. She blames ready made sets for destroying creativity. But in my childhood (early to mid 70's) when Lego sets were much more simple (and therefore "better"), I knew kids, who would _glue_ the assembled sets together; The horror!
So I think that the "build once, then atomize" or "neatly build, then display" strategies, has much more to do, with the childs basic personality (and age), than with what kinds of sets Lego offers.

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.

Re:Legos obsolete

[sllort]

This got them money from rich geeks, but made the product even less pleasant and fun for average, non-technological kids.

Legos are hardly the place for taking pot-shots in the Class Warfare struggle in America. For every nine year old child building remote controlled cars out of legos, there are working class children too, building oil rigs, monster trucks, and freight trains, powerful symbols of blue collar existence. The extensive flexibility introduced by the newer legos do not extend new possibilities just to upper middle class science-fiction fans, but to children everywhere with a solid engineering background and about a hundred dollars.

Pure left wing nonsense!

Re:Oh yea! Especailly the new Harry Potter set!

[Spy Hunter]

The reason so many people hate the new sets is the proliferation of "special pieces." It used to be that lots of Lego sets came with special pieces such as hinges, turntables, and such, but they could always be used in your own models, and most of the pieces were still good old vanilla lego bricks. Now it seems that it is impossible to buy a set without over half of its pieces being large, oddly shaped pieces that can hardly be used in any way other than to build the set in the instructions. Regular lego blocks make up fewer and fewer of the actual pieces. It hinders the creativity aspect when you can only build one thing from your lego pieces. Its sort of missing the point. Legos just become some sort of model kit like a model airplane, which isn't what Legos should be.

Lego and Thought

[under_score]

Lego is one of the best educational toys possible. I grew up with Lego. My father bought me one of the very old technic sets with the yellow, blue and red gears. Wow!

I have played primarily with space sets and technic sets. I have Mindstorms. I build gross huge disgusting complicated stuff. Backhoe loader with 6 degrees of freedom using pnumatics, four digit trinary counter power distribution system, spaceships over a meter long (3') etc.

Oh. And I'm thirty, I have a three-year-old kid, and we play together now :-)

So, Lego is great. But why? Because it does what no other toy I know of does: it challenges the mind in details, in abstractions, in planning, in three-dimensional visualization, in imagination, in story creation, in beauty, in symetry, in working with constraints, in memory (ever had something break and rebuild it from memory?).

Is there any other toy that comes even close?

Buy the sets you think are best. Don't buy the ones you don't think are good. Lego Inc. will get the hint.

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.