Slashdot Mirror
Lego Goes Back to the Basics: Building Blocks
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Slashdot recently covered Lego's plan to stop producing its Mindstorms line in response to the Danish company's worst financial loss in history. While the original article linked focused primarily on Lego's plans to cease production on various toy lines, Yahoo News now has a follow-up article that looks in greater detail at Lego's plan for the future. 'We are returning to Lego's former concept,' says Lego owner and president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. 'We're going to focus on building bricks as our main product, concentrating on little kids' eagerness to assemble.' Kristiansen goes on to blame the company's financial woes on its attempt to follow trends rather than focusing on its more traditional products. In turn, the company's plan for 2004 will include a renewed marketing push for Lego bricks as opposed to licensed products like the Harry Potter and Star Wars lines. Toy researcher Joern Martin Steenhold also notes the following in the article: 'All research, including my own, shows that computer games and other electronic games take up only 20 to 30 percent of children's play time. Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"
I always preffered unabashed Lego sets.
Having 100 of each was great. The sets with instructions were fun, but it really was more enjoyable to be creative. That's what we should getting children to do anyways.
Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?
I'm 38 and still monkey with Lego. When I was sick at home for a few days I had a little contest running with myself. I had built a small Lego "bridge" that could span a piece of legal paper lengthwise (14") then would place a glass of water on it. If the bridge didn't hold then I had water to clean up. If the bridge held for 5 minutes I'd tear it down then 're-engineer' it with less pieces than before. All the regular bricks, no cheating with the longer pieces.
When you're sick a bit of a mental challenge helps you forget the illness. (I was doing this with my Lego blocks from 30+ years ago but I have a lot of Mindstorms stuff too, it's leet)
Trolling is a art,
is a return to the way legos were sold in the 80's, not in sets, yes there were those, but you could also just get a generic set. I have not see a generic set in the stores around here, they all are some set based on some movie game or some thing, but no generic set.
I wonder how this will effect FIRST Lego League, the international robotics competition for middle-schoolers. FLL is a great program from Dean Kamen and the same people who run the FIRST Robotics Competition.
A corporation moving back toward imagination and away from limiting corporate tie-ins, don't see too much flowing in that direction these days. The "themed" Lego sets were the worst thing to happen to toys in my lifetime.
I'm beginning to have faith that I may be able to buy new Lego for my future children, as opposed to having them play with my mess of a collection.
Back in the days you really needed to have some creativity to build somehting with Lego, not just putting together fancy parts of a spacecraft...
I think it's a good thing they are forced to put demands on kids' creativity once again...
but when I was a kid, I remember having much more fun with K'Nex than with legos. K'Nex constructions were larger (some could take up the better part of a room, which kids find tremendously cool), more permanent, and they could have some really neat moving parts (Lego Technix notwithstanding). I played much more with my Big Ball Factory than with the Lego models that I had.
--- Bwah?
The problem with the Slashdot crowd is that not as many /.'ers play with legos and one might think. Most of us have jobs and lives that prevent us from playing with cool toys.
On the other hand, Lego's problems lay deeper than a bloated product line. Lego toys are way, way too expensive. Even when I was a little kid twenty years ago, my parents bought me high quality knockoffs at Sears for like 1/3 the cost of Legos. I imagine that it's worse today.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
> Boys play with traditional toys up until the age
:-)
> of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age
> range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven?
> What about the Slashdot crowd?
Perhaps he was talking mental age?
Seriously though a key trait of the hacker mindset is, I think, playfulness. That shows up in the way hackers mess around with language and Lego. And that playfulness is a key aspect of learning. How many times have you hacked something together "just for the fun of it": in reality half the fun was that you were learning.
The good news is that Lego is going back to the bricks. Great news Lego, that's just what we all needed!
John.
The problem with LEGO is the stupid pieces.
Grab a random $20 kit at a store, it's full of special pieces with no real use.
What happened to actual blocks? you get only a few if any in the average kit.
I was going to buy lego for some children, until I realized I would need a moderate fortune to give them a decent assortment of basic pieces.
Zero to seven
I would never give a child under 1 year old something that swallowable.
Vonal Declosion
He is soon to be a guest on Krusty's Komedy Klassic.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
One thing lego always helped me do was learn to conentrate. I could spend hours just doing one thing. Kids now days seem to spend 5 minute son something then move on
As the old saying goes
"I'm sure my concentration span is...ooh look shiny thing"
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
It'd be nice if they were more affordable though (this is where that nasty global economy / foreign currency things comes into play :(
I C_ ID=7109
Actually, I've been kind of surprised that Lego hasn't hit upon the idea of marketing kits directly to grown-ups, say a line of desk accessories (the pens struck me as lame).
When I got a Fujitsu Point 510 pen slate, I didn't bother to get a stand---thought about making one out of wood, but instead chose to use my old Legos (I've since added a pen holder and a stand for a CD-RW drive to lift it up behind the Fujitsu Stylistic I did purchase a stand for (was running low on Legos)).
Pictures of the Point 510 and stand should be here:
http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOP
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I've always been interested in the Mindstorms, but never quite enough to buy 'em, always figuring "Some day, some day..." Well, it looks like "some day" has arrived, and I don't know which ones to geek out on. I'd like to:
- Have something mobile
- Have it be controllable via Linux
- Have it do nifty things
For those of you that've already bought/geeked out on/played with them, which models (that are still available) have brought you the most joy?
------------------
I like the "back to the basics" idea. Today's Lego sets look way too specialized to me- too many specialized pieces, not enough basic Lego bricks- so there's a lot less creative potential. They also look way too expensive.
I think that selling basic Lego sets again is a nice potential return to the things I liked about Legos as a kid in the early 80's. It would be nice if they could sell the basic sets in addition to the fancier licsensed sets and the advanced products like Mindstorms instead of canning those products entirely, but all in all I like this move.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Now if they'd switch to some sort of fast-degrading plastic or better still, edible, they'd have a huge demand without end.
Oh wait.. Slashdot... women...
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
I recall being surprised that the parking lot for Legoland was nearly deserted, until I saw the admission price.
Anyway, I know I'll miss Mindstorms. I wonder what other lines they'll drop?
John
Gosh, that's going to be one unhappy baby. All it wants is something plush that maybe it can wrap its tiny fingers around while lying in the bassinet, and instead it's going to get a pile of hard, sharp angled blocks that it cannot possibly understand how to assemble. The odds of a zero-year-old choking on Legos, I would estimate at fifty-fifty.
What a horrible idea.
--
RumorsDaily
Legos were much better when they were simply blocks and YOUR IMAGINATION was what mattered. I've watched my little brothers put together newer lego sets where most of the pieces are designed to fit together in ONE SPECIFIC WAY. Everything is already planned out, and you are supposed to follow the directions (like a some-assembly-required toy).
I'm all for plain old blocks again. And I wouldn't be surprised if that leads to higher revenues again.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
What about girls? (And there's supposed to be ingrained gender equality in Denmark hmmmf!)
OK, the girls that play with Legos and stuff like that might get shunned by the the silly girls who play with dolls and maybe some parents want their little girls to wear frilly dresses and play with dolls and girlie stuff but 1) it was always more fun to play with the boys, and 2) who says you can't make a tea party set with lego blocks??
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Although I don't ever touch legos unless I am playing with a younger sibling, I think this is a move long overdue. We never, ever bought any of the licensed stuff, as most of it was silly. Why would I want a Star Wars lego set when I could get a GI Joe sized star wars figurines?
The beauty of legos is that it stimulates the imagination, and I think that kids nowadays have decidedly less imagination than those of previous years (I am not saying that this is only due to Lego...it seems less children are encouraged to find a quite place and read a lot as well).
This makes me very happy to hear. I'm 25 and my favorite lego series was the "Model Team" with the Semi trucks, jeeps, vans, helicopters and generally cool, LARGE fully functional models of real life vehicles.
I recently rebuilt my model team semi and it now rests proudly on my desk. Right now they have a very nice lego Shuttle in the stores for $50 bucks (same price as most of the model team models back in the day, and even today on ebay)that I've been trying to convince my wife we need...hehe
Its really disapointing to go to the store and see Soccer, Harry Potter, and Star Wars sets with little more than 20 pieces and some look alike action figures. Give the kids somthing that will take them a few hours to build and leave them enough blocks to construct something different if they should choose.
Just this weekend I noticed some new sets out called "design sets" that were of normal everyday objects (one was a pontoon plane) and each set is capable of being at least 3 different things. (I assume they have docs inside which show how to convert as well..at least the last technic model I bought did)
This is the lego I remember and love, and I think more parents would rather buy somthing that can be more than just a scene from SW or HP.
Apple free since 1990!
You're not grown, you're just OLD .
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Nice big thread you've got going here... ;)
Nothing at all wrong with the Bionicle bricks, it just requires a bit more work to get interesting things out of it. Unfortunately I've lost the link, but somewhere out there on the the big wide net are all the main ships from the mighty Ikaruga, made out of Bionicle stuff; amazing work I'd recommend hunting for.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Isn't Lego being a bit harsh on itself after a down year in sales? They were still profitable in 2002. I can't find the profit and loss numbers of the previous years, although statements have been made that 1998 was Lego's first loss year.
...
I have a mindstorms set, I really like the technic boxes, and I'm amazed Lego's sole interest for the future would be in 0-7 year olds. All of the young boys (7-10 year olds) in my neighborhood and family still seem to be getting huge piles of Lego blocks
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
The world would be a better place without Lego. It makes money by putting its competitors out of business. Its IP is arguably very minimal - anybody could make those little plastic bricks! Its patents ran out in the 80's, and since then it has been insisting that bricks are it's trademark! It has inhibited innovation and stiffed competition where it can. It is great news that it is finally out of steam and looks set to join SCO in the bargain basement. This is mostly down to the United States Court of Appeals, which rejected Lego's common law trademark argument. God bless America. Instead of lauding this morally corrupt capitalist giant, do what you can to expose its wicked ways and support alternative, 'open source' brick designs which are cheaper and can be made anywhere.
Obviously, we're above average in terms of Lego consumption... but one question has always bounced around in the back of my head: If my regular bricks from the 1970s are still as new looking as brand-new bricks, why would I spend more money on the same bricks for my kids when I can just give them mine?
That has always been where Lego's corporate thought has failed them. Tinkertoys, while not the same brand nowadays as Lego is, broke... making you go out and get a new set. Very little of the Lego stuff breaks (it just tears into your bare foot when you step on one with all of your weight).
They already have some Lego stores in the mall, I don't think it would be too hard to add a bulk section.
Being able to buy a 1/2 pound of triangle, rectangle, or square pieces would be great if you are missing pieces or if you want to buy you kid or husband a heck of a lot of legos to foster their imagination.
After getting several kits, though, then I could come up with more designs, like centipede monsters, etc, but I still felt constrained by how specialized the pieces were. It's hard to figure out an alternate use for the little brain piece that only connects with one other piece, for example The ball-socket joints and the gears were a nice addition though.
Anyway, I'm glad to see legos returning to the original free-form ideal rather than becoming a glorified action-figure maker.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
Well, for starters, there's a lot more kids under ten than there are Slashdotters. Millions more.
And the electronic products are expensive, relatively low-margin products that can only make them money if they sell lots of them. While Good Old Plastic Blocks are incredibly cheap to make, can be sold for a huge markup, and appeal to a lot more than just folks who want retro toys.
I'm sure they'll still make some money off the licensed stuff for the time being, but licensed products have higher costs and since they're designed to be used for specific things they aren't really as interchangeable as standard Legos. And they cost the buyer more, too.
Mindstorms may be wicked cool, but Lego needs to make a profit. They made lots of money selling plain old blocks, then they decided that they needed to grow into other areas to survive. It didn't work.
I'll miss the cool stuff like Mindstorms, but in a couple of years when my son is old enough to play with Legos I'll be buying them for him. And he won't miss the robotics at all, I suspect.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
To continue bragging we also had a program that would jam robot signals, and even one to erase the firmware!!! However, the competition was too weak, and we never used it during the matches. (Only a last resort during the last 30 seconds. If only they had done battlebots. . .
But to stop bragging, I learned a TON about computers, reverse engineering the signals etc, engineering and teamwork. I wish that more kids had the oppurtunity to do this, as this was THE highlight of my years in Middle School.
Mod Wisely.
I have a 6 and 3 year old, and we're moving from duplo to lego. I consider these essential toys.
;-) ) is its interchangeability of pieces and flexibility. Their recent design and marketing trend suppressed its fundamental characteristic!
It drives me nuts to go shopping and see only pre-determined model sets, with all kinds of non-generic parts that, once inevitably added to the bucket, will not be used as intended, and in fact will get misplaced into other toy boxes and barely used at all.
I don't appreciate paying the premium for a product design that comes broken in the box. The whole point of lego (in my 38 years of experience playing with it
Lego is, in principle, back to basics, I'm happy to see them waking up to that again. I'll be one of the first to go and get a generic assortment box when I see them on the shelves again.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Do you know the difference between a clitoris and a Lego brick?
If you don't, keep playing with Lego.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
I remember LEGOs were getting more toy-like with bigger atomic pieces that were more specialized and you couldnt do much with it. In my castle set, there was a shark with just two pieces.. the shark and the upper jaw... so wheres the creativity about that?
... like that perforated metal set I forgot the name of.
The technic sets were more creative, with little gears and small unspecific atomic pieces I could do neat things with. I never made what the original box intended.. but always had my own ideas usually a giant combined robot.. like transformers which could transform into a car.
I saw that harry potter set and thought you really cant do much with that. That was a doll set not a building block set. The markets kicked some sense into their heads now and I hope they dont just build bricks but atomic mechanical pieces
Gears, cogs, motors, rods, bearings, pulleys, screws.. things like that will help kids and motivate them to buy more sets for more pieces. Kids really REALLY dont want to build showsets of various movie themes unless they fall on the wrong side of the gender preference.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I must say, going back to the original pieces will help me with my preferred lego project: computer cases.
argh... sucks being a poor college kid.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
Legos is going the wrong way! They shouldn't be simplifying their available projects, they should just be changing them to target the future...
Imagine tech support calls:
Tech: Tech support how may I help you?
Caller: Yeah I'm having a problem plugging in the processor to the motherboard
Tech: Were you following the directions? What step are you on?
Caller: Instructions? Hell I've just been stacking parts on top of each other like I did when I was a kid!
When I was in college I decided to give all my old Lego to some young cousins who would have more time to appreciate them than I did. So I packed them all up in a big suitcase and flew out to visit. En route, the suitcase was affixed with a big luggage tag.
When I got there, my cousin, who was probably about five, looked at the suitcase and said "Hey! It says LEGO on it!!". Sure enough -- the routing code printed on the tag in big letters was 0637 -- "LEGO" upside down.
I love it when randomness works in interesting ways.
circa75.com
They'll sell for a high price in eBay after a few years if Lego really stops making 'em...
You could throw a rock from any one of the drugstores and hit any of the other ones. I am sure there is some reason for this, but I have yet to be told what it is.
Americans are drug addicts?
'Zero' may be a bit of an exaggeration, but...
:)
You have obviously not seen the large-size block kits they make available for young ages. While still requiring adult supervision (I've learned from experience with my own kids that anything smaller than an elephant represents a potential choking hazard), they seem to be very well-regarded by the very, very young.
Both my boys started banging around with the large blocks pretty much as soon as they were able to start gripping things. And they picked up on the "snap together" approach pretty quickly. Granted, most of the resulting designs represent a, shall we say, 'non-Euclidean geometry' view of the world, but they just love putting them together.
Many of the parents we know say they've seen the same things w/ their kids. So they might be onto something...
As a young boy I spent quite a bit of time building stuff out of Lego. I am now 25 years old and have long ago realized that the Lego activities of my youth was a large contributor to my current interest and skills in engineering.
Often I have wanted to acuire some Lego to get back into that inspiring creativity again, but have been turned away by the fact that Lego sets didn't contain much Lego anymore. I wished, in fact, that they would go back to the way Lego was in the eighties when the parts were bricks and not for example a wing or a chair or some such single-purpose item.
So I see this as Good News. It will probably spark a revival among people such as me and, I suspect, many others who frequently visit this site.
there is no spoon
[javac] 100 errors
I bought an giant tub of lego, >2000 bits in it.
It was mostly empty and most of the bits were one or two square size!!
I was very angry!
New lego in the UK costs about 100 GBP per kilo.
Lego on ebay costs 10 GBP per kilo.
For the summer I bought 15 Kilo of lego, enough for 5 children to play with (no, I dont have 5 children.)
I bought it from ebay!
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Mindstorms is all about three things: RCXes, motors and sensors. The RCX is the "brain" that you program. It has inputs and outputs.
You want to buy as many Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention Systems as you can. Each RIS kit comes with an RCX, two motors and various sensors. The kit also includes plenty of wheels, axles and generic blocks for building just about anything. It's a good bargain. I own two kits and probably need more now that they'll be discontinued.
The accessory kits have been somewhat of a disappointment for me, but it is how you get some different sensors. You can order discrete parts directly from Lego but you end up paying a lot.
I don't know about gears at this time, but you can buy just about anything else you might want for a HUGE number of projects without having to pay insane amounts of money to have items machined for you. As long as you stick to 'standard' items, you will be more then fine.
The web-site is www.mcmaster.com
Good hunting!
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Back when Lego introduced a lot of the new stuff I couldn't see the point, as it limited the use of specialty items, which was IMHO unattractive. In my youth I made lots of stuff and spent uncounted hours developing my imagination with a few simple pieces. I'm sure my parents loved it, as it kept me busy and quiet while building things. Same applied to Erector sets, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. Provide the kids with the basics and their minds will do the rest. Provide them with limited toys and they lose interest in a short time and expect something new.
There was also something like brown or red plastic girders and green plastic sheets which could be used to make buildings, houses, etc. which were really cool, but I can't remember the name of. I'd buy them if they were still for sale.
Once again, brick and mortar prove most successful.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Lego was by far my favourite toy growing up. Indeed, I played with the stuff so much that I am convinced that it has affected my thinking patterns, and in good ways. My visual-spatial sense is excellent, and my mind is forever trying to break down problems into modular pieces; or, seeing a collection of modular components, trying to figure out intriguing ways to assemble them into a larger system. In short, ladies and gentlemen, I think in Lego.
That said, I hope that the Lego company goes about this the right way. The things I always wanted as a youngster were more hinges and other such articulated pieces in order to build things like spacecraft and vehicles with moving parts; doors and hatches that open, sensors that swivel, and so forth. Lego's strengths were always in the design of clever models that most of us would build at least once. You could learn some neat tricks by understanding how the model designers accomplished a particular effect using a small number of bricks. I agree with posters to a previous Lego story who criticized the overabundance of specialized pieces (anathema to the creative Lego builder) and the rather exorbitant prices of Lego kits.
Perhaps Lego has decided that its future is no longer in robotics, but computers can play a role in its revival. Embrace the Internet! As so many slashdotters will attest, there are large numbers of people for whom Lego remains a unique creative outlet. Work to bring them together through the Net, and offer to sell them what they want through that same channel. More standardized, well-thought-out basic bricks, offered with the promise of volume discounts through Internet purchases. Parents who still enjoy Lego and can get access to their favourite toy in bulk and share their love of creating with a community of fellow builders will have kids who will get an early taste of the joys of building with little plastic blocks, and will thus pass on the hobby to the next generation.
In a world without walls, there is no need for Windows.
I am constantly frustrated when I try to buy Legos for my daughter. She loves building with Legos, but is not really interested in the kind of macho directions Lego has been going (fighting themes). Clikits does not fit the bill, and it's almost impossible to find a store that carries Belville sets.
Maybe if Lego would try harder and with more imagination to reach the other 50% of the zero-to-seven set, they's make more money.
Funny how lego has been so succesfull up until when their brick patent expired. Immediately then a Canadian (huh, it's not chinese?) competitor Megablock http://www.megabloks.com/ came in with compatible and cheaper bricks. Lego tried ruling them out in courts, but the EEC enforced the patents expiration. Megablok is eating Lego's marketshare like hotcakes here in France. Mega bloks strategy is quite simple: 1) comptabile lego bricks 2) cheaper than lego bricks 3) big buckets of random pieces to start a collection 4) if lego comes out with a Harry Potter collection, they bring out a Generic Magician range (no cross branding). Hugely succesfull as I stated. I believe Lego has lacked innovation due to such a long period of growth and protection under a patent. Don't be fooled by the companie's leader position (remember what happenned to Anderson). If this company doesn't have an electrochoc and start innovating again, it could be gone 10 years from now.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
We just dealt with Lego and its increasing obsolescence over the holidays. My son received a Lego studio set which, to my surprise, shipped with software that would not run under Windows 2000 and XP. Only Win95/98. (Wonder if Lego is aware that January 16 2004 is just around the corner). Could they really be that backwards? I absolutely could not believe that a brand new package from ToysRUs shipped with OS support that would die in two weeks.
A visit to Lego's website was even more discouraging:
- no online downloads of XP/2K compatible versions (hey, if you oops in shipping and have a million boxes of this stuff out there that won't work, and won't recall the boxes, then put the working software online for downloads). You have to fill out a form to request they MAIL it. (Two weeks for a confirmation of our request, 4-12 weeks delivery date specified in the response).
- no opt-out fields on the submission forms: you have to provide all the nice marketing details (email, address, age, etc.) to request help, but Lego's form doesn't let you click "don't add my info to your marketing database."
I did issue a complaint about the opt-out matter and received a form reply with a link to where their privacy page was on the website (wasn't linked on any of the pages we were at). Didn't address the opt-out issue though. Guess who's getting Lego sales announcements now? Ugh.
In otherwords, Lego was a fossil of a company, doing business in the 1950s. What is really troubling, however, is that I doubt Lego can shift from its higher margin, high overhead approach to one where they just sell plastic blocks (and compete with Chinese knockoff brands for 10% margins). This news really predicts the end of Lego.
What do you mean, "What about the Slashdot crowd?" -- they're zero-indexing their age range, aren't they? Isn't that enough?
I remember seeing on TV a while ago a story about Etch-A-Sketch. Talk about the "tried and true." Apparently, the company has stuck with this sole product forever and makes a boat load of money with it.
That's not to say, though, that I wouldn't buy a Python programmable version of the toy ;-)
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I think it's a shame that they're phasing it out, but at the same time, I'd much rather spend the $100 on a bunch of plain old bricks. Enough normal bricks might make some of those specialty Harry Potter pieces usable.
~d (longing for the days of the old Castle sets, where you built the damn thing yourself rather than putting 4 pieces together)
I watched my little nephew put together one of these "Bionicles" this weekend, and I was saddened at the way Lego had gone from being a building toy where you created something out of your imagination to being just an action figure with a gimmick: you get to assemble it yourself. I was actually surprised when I realized the toy he was building was "Lego."
Now, I haven't seen the mindstorms; those probably fit more with the concept of encouraging creativity than the toy I saw Saturday. But I'm glad to hear they're going to start producing toy sets again and promoting them over Harry Potter and Star Wars action figures relabelled as Legos.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
As a child of the 80's, I'm generally ready to throw my hard-earned money at any company that is willing to help me relive my materialistic childhood. A couple of years ago, I wanted to pick up some Legos to relive some of my youth. I was shocked to see how expensive they were...
Looking online at this moment, I can see there are tubs of random pieces for sale for as little as $6.99. Did I just happen to stumble upon some of the commercially tied-in Legos a few years back or something? Or are these tubs the cast-offs that are supposed appeal to people who don't want to spend as much?
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Sure lego is a great toy. I loved it when I was young and even like the idea of mindstorm. But even as an adult with a very reasonable income I find lego just a bit to much. What the lego company never seemed to have grasped is economy of scale. Make it as cheap as possible so that as many people will buy it as possible. Instead they charge a premium. This is a fine business tactic until the economy goes down.
Compare premium airlines with the budget ones when the bubble burst. Compare big american cars with japanese car when the fuel crisis hit.
Oh well good luck to them. Maybe if they go bust I can pick up some mindstorm in the bargain basement.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've found that the more complex Legos have gotten, the harder it is to work/play together with friends family. Years ago, you could ask for a 'flat 4-by-2' and every one would know what you meant. Most of my newer Legos - while organized in baggies or tackle-boxes - are as of yet unnamed.
Your monitor is staring at you.
I've got 2 test subjects, er, 21-month-old boy/girl twins at home, and we allow them to play with whatever toys they want to.
Generally, they both play with (and share) the Duplo blocks (Legos are still a choking hazard), the Matchbox cars, the Mr. (and Mrs.) Potato Head, the Brio trains, my bass amp, and so on. There are also baby dolls (boy/girl twins, like them), various stuffed critters, and the Little Tykes kitchen our friends gave them. And books -- tons of 'em. Boynton, Little Golden Books, DK, Shel Silverstein poetry, Dr. Seuss, Pooh (AA Milne, not the Disney-fied crap), etc. They sometimes insist on taking a book to bed with them at nap time...
Does my son play with the trains more than the kitchen? Seems like it to me.
Does my daughter play more with the baby dolls? Again, seems like it to me.
Do we "direct" them in their play, shooing them away from any particular toy or "suggesting" to them to play with something else instead?
Absolutely not.
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
I am sure there is some reason for this, but I have yet to be told what it is.
Ever notice how often you'll find a gas station right across the street from another gas station? Even if they both have the same price? It's because there's enough traffic to justify their existence. You are describing the same trend when it comes to America's increasingly aged population.
The older you get the more pills you pop, and those pills keep costing more and more (and generating more and more profit no doubt), and when you're 75 with a cane, a stone's throw is from your bladder to the bowl, making an intersection, let alone a city block seem like a great distance.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Perhaps someone doesn't need/want to get into the whole 'circuit boards, some metal, and an arc welder' project because they don't have the space, time or knowledge to do so.
I don't understand the difference between pencil and paper and crayons and paper, or why clay is different than making mud pies, or how a CAD program is going to give me something I can hold.
I'm not sure where you got your seemingly arbitrary distinctions of what makes a toy a toy, and what can be used for 'grown-up' work; apparently you are blinding yourself to the ease of use, standard sizes, flexible assembly and unique qualities that Lego has.
Clay, paper and pencils, metal, and CAD software all serve some purpose, but when I want ten little rolling carts to hold screws, and I want it in 10 minutes, I'll go with Lego.
I'll bring you a cup of coffee while you're in the garage setting up the lathe and wirefeed.
Lego are tools that happen to be toys as well.
Don't get caught up in limiting your free expression, use the right tool, or toy, for the task at hand.
Here's hoping that Meccano follows suit.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
On a related note, there was an intersection near my home town that for a while had a gas station on each of the four corners. Recently they torn one gas station down and put up what else? A Walgreens!
Lasers Controlled Games!
Yup, I just got/built the offroader a couple of years ago...and it is awesome. My Legos wish list: 1. Better integration between Technics and the traditional bricks. 2. Technics bulk sets, not a particular model, just bunches of parts. Like the bricks used to be.
The existence of basic Legos is absolutely critical to the fostering of a generation capable of survival in the coming century, and I am not engaged in hyperbole here.
1. I work as a policy wonk, but have always had a technical bent; it's just enough that I will take apart the things that I own, or install my own software, or be mad when something is poorly designed. In a variety of other ways, I realize that the technologies I own did not happen to me and are not immutable. They are for me to use, they could have been made differently, and I fundamentally have control over them, to modify or reject them.
This is a worldview formed before, really, I had ever touched a piece of software; formed entirely from playing with Legos for HOURS A DAY when I was little. I would posit that the United States' technological elite, people who really look at a computer program or a bacteria or a steam engine and think "I could take that apart and do that better", played with Legos far more than the general population.
Cause and effect there are left as an exercise for the student, but the point remains that Legos are the preferred play object of the people who grow up and become our producers of technology; and if you think play is not that important to learning, attitude development, and general life outlook, you need to read some educational or vertebrate behavior research, or at least go watch some otters.
So if we grant that they're centrally important (and if you would doubt this, why are so many of you so fond of them? Why does Slashdot have a Lego icon?) then their *composition* and *direction* is centrally important. Our kids should feel that helicopters, robots, dinosaurs are made out of simple parts that can go together different ways, that to find out how those parts go together you have to *try things out* and *maybe screw up*, and that you, at six years old, can make something new and cool that no one has seen before and be proud of it.
The other option is just to have another pre-molded piece of plastic that works, for sure, first time. You're not sure why, someone else designed it, that's where technology comes from, I didn't have anything to do with putting it together because I can't do something like that, *fast forward ten years* what? Digital Rights Management? Biometric scanning in shopping malls? OK, I'm no engineer. These things happen, you can't change them. Is this a pill that I should take? If you say so, doctor, no point looking at it, machines are something other people make and understand and then I consume them as is, especially if they're trendy. *shudder.*
I've had trouble for years articulating why it bothered me so much that Lego was moving towards more specialized pieces and more licensed properties; they were teaching passivity and damaging the kind of play that gave me what intelligence I think I have today.
2. The tiny yellow Lego people of my youth existed in a shiny, functioning, Utopian republic, where there was no violence, no conflict, and the guy who drove the tow truck one day could - would - pilot the innovate Space Shuttle / submarine / dinosaur hybrid the next.
Maybe not a viable image of the world for the long term, but a good first impression, and one that fixed in your head an early impression that what you did with technology was design better police boats and monorails and ice cream shops and in general make a better place in which to live your lives, rather than, say, Spam programs or chemical weapons. These are all habits of mind that I want my kinds to get early, far earlier than they grasp that they must follow the hot toy or trend of the moment.
I had not realized that this was upsetting me until it appears to be moving towards a solution. Halleleujah.
cc: Lego North America.
Pixel Blocks have only one shape, but 20+ colors. They're designed to attach to each other in three dimensions, to form models or images.
While they're still a bit expensive thanks to the company's small size and high overhead, they charge ~$7 for 200 pieces, instead of Lego's overall dime-a-piece average (~$7 fo 70 pieces).
[
Will Lego continue their educational branch, and if so, will it still have a robotics product?
:), in Alabama (where I lived at the time) to buy a Mindstorms set and drove 2 hours to get there at midnight to buy from a friend the day they hit the shelves.
I'm 32 and still play with and occasionally buy Mindstorms stuff. I was the first person, to my knowledge anyway
My last 2 projects involved cheating at games. 1 was made to automatically mash a button on a PS2 controller when it sensed a lightning flash in Final Fantasy X. The other jiggled my wife's Pikachu2 minigame until it was at it's happiest state. This isn't to point out how to cheat but rather how Mindstorms can be adapted to TONS of applications. I am looking forward to what my someday future children might do with them.
I definitely see them as educational toys for the teenage crowd and I don't know of anything in the same price range (which means I would pay more) with the same flexibility.
I understand Lego going back to the basics, I agree with many that they nearly specialized themselves into oblivion. I won't miss the movie tie-ins (my wife WILL miss the Harry Potter clutter though) and Bionicles was just too much to collect in the end (I tried). However, I really hope Mindstorms and the Technics line live on somehow.
Perhaps Lego needs to branch an adult-focused (ahem, not -that- kind) company so that the 2 lines (3 if you count their educational branch) can work autonomously and not pull each other down but still partner when it makes sense.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Come to think of it, that would make for one of the saner forwards from her.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To my mind, Lego's return to basics is a great feature, but beyond that, they have always made it as difficult as possible to purchase their products. My girls are just about grown, but when I was buying Lego for them (and myself!), I constantly ran into arbitrary road blocks to purchase, and I don't (yet) see this mindset changing with the back-to-basics transition:
In my view, the Lego people still have a lot to learn about removing barriers to purchase.
In the last few days, I've seen much discussion, and recevied many questions about the future of the company. As you probably saw/heard, 2003 was a rough year for the LEGO Company, for a number of reasons. Kjeld has retaken the helm,and has said that we are returning to "our core".
Rest assured, "our core" simply means our toy business. Which is to say, our toy product lines present and future.
Harry Potter and Star Wars are NOT going away any time soon. Licenses are not going to stop, simply continue to improve. We have to take (and have taken) steps to ensure we manage the peaks and valleys that licensing brings with it (Movie years vs. non-movie years, for example). We are still going to be going after the top licenses with the right brand fit.
In fact, we have announced what I think is going to be a great license today:Dora the Explorer
Mindstorms is not going away, but may continue to evolve. Like all technology products, Mindstorms will continue to grow and improve as consumers gain new technology knowledge and technology itself continues to get better and smaller.
Another fear I've heard is that the "What Will You Make?" line is going away. This is not true, and the 2003 product line showed great success and potential. Stay tuned for more great WWYM products in 2004!
More information will be forthcoming, as the changes progress.
Thanks!
Jake
---
Jake McKee
Community Development Manager
LEGO Community Development
Contrux were amazing!
I made a robocop powersuit out of them. I even made a gun and a power knife.
You could also make some fantastic ninja throwing stars out of them.
What Lego needs to do is lower their prices. Their prices are just ludicrous! 80-120$ Can for a box of Legos? Lower the price to 20-30$ and people will buy.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
A leg shaped block can really only be a leg. A block shaped block can be whatever you want.
--- Ban humanity.
A: Lego Army men
B: Lego Star trek (yeah, ok, they'd need copyright stuff, but I know that there'd be a proliferation of lego comic things... And I'd buy them just to take pictures of the red shirted ensign pieces getting killed in various ways.)
C: Lego Warhammer 40k (finally, a cheap and fun way to play warhammer! Of course this would be directed at the younger crowd...)
D: Lego D&D (Miniatures take too damn long to paint.)
E: Lego Half life
F: Lego programming department (so the
Too bad they'd never get the copyright stuff...
I have played with Legos for over 40 years. I've built static models, moving models, even motorized and robotic models. From basic assembly skills to advanced robotic programming I have seen Legos change in a changing world. My son was brought up on Legos, and before we got a small inflatable pool for them I too stepped on them in the dark of night; Ouch!
Over the years I have followed the gradual trends, Duplo for smaller children, Techno for teenagers and the ever growing number of theme based kits. While the Robotic kits may be the big money loser, I believe that the real killer has been all those theme kits. For 20 bucks you can get a bucket with a few hundred unspecialized pieces, or 75 pieces of highly specialized blocks. Sure a race car or three little go-karts is much more like a toy, and many other things can be built with a specialized set, but collecting Legos through these specialized sets is both expensive and time consuming. Keeping specialized blocks (hands, hats and other smaller that 2X pieces) is is difficult at best. I've probably spent a week of my life at this point sifting through that sea of parts looking for some special piece or articulating joint or gear or axle to complete a project. Don't get me wrong, specialized pieces are definitely cool! But they become a huge waste of time if you don't spend almost as much on developing your own specialized storage system to deal with them.
Then there is the whole software aspect of Legos. (Anyone remember Micorserfs?) Lego spent quite a lot on Lego software. Now there are several 'virtual lego' products. I'm sure that we all remember the Lego diagrams that show how to build something. Those drawings are some of the cleanest engineering and assembly guides around. The software was supposed to enable end users to do that kind of thing, but unfortunately it crashed more machines than it loaded on in the first few go arounds. By the time that MIT's smart brick became the model for the Robotics kits there was even a slick, GUI driven programming model; one which I'm still torn by, because it's either the slickest tool for coding or one of those just over the edge towards madness gizmos depending on how the day/stress level/project deadline is. But you can't really build with Legos at the keyboard, nor can you read most displays from the floor, so I'm not sure that the whole Lego-Computer thing was very well conceived.
Now Lego with RFID tags might be something! Plug your Lego scanner into the computer and watch thOr maybe some kind of 'Etch-a-sketch' sized pad that could display how to build something would probably work better that a computer because you can use it right where you play with Legos. Your upgrade packs could come with inventory files so that the models that were displayed could be built with the pieces on hand. Hell, even a scanner to locate that missing piece could be incorporated!
I'd hate to lose a company like Lego, so I hope that they can 're-generalize and re-integrate' their product line into today's reality.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
As an aside, I know of at least one architect who actually models structure out in Lego like it was a 3d sketch pad. Pretty much if it holds together with Lego, you can easily build it out of anything.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Mindstorms came later, use a bubble-gum programming interface, and has no way of expanding.
I am all for stretching their minds. But there is stretching your mind to learn algebra, and there is stretching your mind to work out Kabbalistic numerology. One is applicable to everyday life. The other is suspect at worst, and completely in-applicable to anything else at best.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I was a huge, huge Lego fan. I have most of the space sets from 1980 on to whenever it was I stopped playing with Legos, '87, or '88 I think. Still have all the catalogs, sets, and instructions.
Occasionally in a fit of nostalgia I wander into the toy section to check out the new sets, and boy have they been dumbed down. When I played with Legos, I'd have sets that had 300 pieces. The bricks were bricks...You could put them together in just about any way you wanted, regardless of what the instructions said. Now the pieces are so specialized and few there's only one way to put them together, and you can do it in 5 minutes. It's not "space" and "town" and "castle" sets anymore. I don't think those even exist, and it looks like the offerings are mostly vehicles and micro-sets, so forget building your own town or space base. I think one of the reasons that Lego is doing so badly is that most people who played with Legos when they were kids are parents now, and see the same thing I'm seeing. I bet they have started looking elsewhere for stimulating toys.
-R
"Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"
You mean they're not synonymous with each other?
30 and counting.
For Christmas, my wife got me a set of Legos - perhaps intended to keep me away from the computer.
It worked! Now she hates both Legos and the computer...
I don't know, but there's just something about a mental challenge that I find irresistable.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
You cannot clone a highly recognized brand name.
You cannot clone (very easily) great customer service (and the accompanying customer loyalty).
They can continue to be successfuly by sticking with what made them successful in the first place: a good product, great designs, and strong customer support.
They will not "differentiate" themselves by adding their "Spider-Man" or "Star Wars" products to the vast sea of other "Spider-Man" or "Star Wars" products already available.
Think about it: it's easy to come up with multiple uses for a simple brick. Faced with the brown log-cabin wall pieces from the old Western-themed sets, well, what would you do then? A friend of mine was puzzling over that, and finally came up with a scale model of his old, ugly foam-and-corduroy couch (with a skeleton of Technic pieces). When you _do_ come up with alternate uses for highly specialized pieces, the results are really dazzling.
As long as I'm being heretical, I'll say that the Star Wars sets are the best things that happened to Lego in ten years. Those models are much higher quality and piece count than a lot of what came before, they got lots of geeks like me involved in Lego for the first time in their adult lives, and many of the "specialized" pieces created just for Star Wars sets turn out to be very versatile and beautiful. (Printed designs on pieces have got to go, though, as does the entire ugly-as-sin Harry Potter line.)
If you don't pretend to be anyone, are you?
I was shopping for gifts for the younger tikes in my family at Toys R Us and I was lamenting that they didn't have the legos I grew up with. I played with those things for hours and hours until I hit the 'teens. Like many people here, I attribute some of my exercised creativity and engineering acumen to that toy. I want the same for my family's offspring. I couldn't see how a star wars or harry potter set would give a kid enough generic stuff to build what they wanted to build.
I'm so happy lego made this decision that I went to their website to write them a thank you note. Having to register, I used my ubiquitous spoonyfork handle and it wouldn't let me because Username cannot contain 'poo'.. Right. :/
Speak truth to power.
Escher's "Relativity":
r el ativity.html
2 P1 26556727EFF0200P2205L4M1.JPG
http://www.lipsons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/escher/
More topical, guess what's holding the CD containing 3.5 million peoples' names to Spirit's "dashboard"?
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/002/
Playing? HA! You better believe it's playing. And it's far more important than work, IMO.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
For LEGO news, see lugnet.com Anyway, here's a link to something that indicates the lines aren't going away... they're just refocusing on selling the basic brick sets. http://news.lugnet.com/lego/?n=625
You mean to tell me that this stinker of a themepark had nothing to do with their losses?
Dolemite
_____________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
I can't deny that Lego going back to the basics is a wonderful idea, but I also feel that there is still business to be made selling -choice- movie tie-ins, namely Harry Potter and Star Wars.
I love the idea that I may be able to walk into a store and buy just ton upon ton of blocks, but nevertheless feel that there are some parents that say, "Hey, look! Harry Potter!".
And they should keep the Mindstorms and Technic lines alive. (I don't know if they have plans to cut the Technic line, though I doubt it) Mindstorms, for the educational value, and Technic as the "step-up" set.
But all in all, this is a good move for Lego.
The reason your sons migrates to "boy" toys and your daughter migrates to "girl" toys is most likely because of the advertising of the toys, how they're perceived in society, and the role they play in social interaction.
At *less than two*? No, I don't buy it. I agree that social things in school have a phenomenal impact on how girls and guys intract, but before that...no.
Perhaps. Of course, this rhetoric is also fairly recent feminist stuff, probably around the 1700s or so or later.
There *are* plausible biological justifications for girls and guys being different at mental levels. Almost anyone says "awww...cute" when looking at a baby. I cannot believe that this is entirely propagated via memes through society. The same thing is true of sexual attractiveness -- there clearly is a possibility for gense to pattern-match and attach to mental thought fairly high-level concepts.
Now, that being said, women get pregant. It's damned hard to run and hunt, say, a deer if you're pregnant. I'm not a woman, but I'd also suspect that it's a bit of a pain to be running when one has breasts heavy from lactating. Plus, a mother needs to be around to feed a kid milk for his infancy. This means that it's not exactly unreasonable to expect women to evolve traits beneficial to being around babies. Since there's clearly a benefit to having *someone* able to run out and get meat, and the only free person in a two-person-pairing is the male, it makes sense to expect men to evolve trais beneficial to hunting (and perhaps even to making war). Hunting can involve being away from a baby for a long time, and at least later forms of war, the same. There are clearly physical differences -- men are decidedly larger and more muscular.
Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't a positive feedback loop, where someone might be *slightly* inclined towards some set of interests and society tends to shove him (or her) faster and faster down a path. That doesn't mean that a girl must inevitably have "girlish" interests or a guy must have "guy" interests. However, it *does* mean that it's quite reasonable to treat claims that roles and interests derive *entirely* from society with skepticism.
May we never see th
Lego's meant to foster creativity ("A New Toy Everyday (tm)") and you've just proved it. You MADE the tool you needed to do the job, and a few years later, here you are on Slashdot. I'm sure there's a correlation between lego use as a child and adult mad geek skillz...