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LEGO Brick 50th Anniversary

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the can't-wait-for-them-not-to-be-a-choking-hazard dept.

An anonymous reader writes "'The LEGO brick turns 50 at exactly 1:58pm today. This cool timeline shows these fifty years of building frenzy by happy kids and kids-at-heart, all the milestones from the Legoland themed sets to Technic and Mindstorms NXT, as well as all kind of weird curiosities about the most famous stud-and-tube couple system in the world.'" Of course, it all peaked in 1979 with the space set. These kids these days with their bionacle. bah.

2 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. too many custom parts. by oliverthered · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Lego now has far too many custom parts, it's a bit more like building some flat pack furniture that a chance to be creative.

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    thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    1. Re:too many custom parts. by Viceroy+Potatohead · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A couple of years ago, I was playing with a friend's kid and wanted to change the directional plane of what I was building, so I took a "plate" type piece (the 1/3 thickness ones, or skinny ones or whatever) and stuck it edgewise on the face of what I had already built. (I'm not sure that I've explained very well, but I'm sure most people used to do this). The kid was pretty excited to use this new trick, and started to incorporate it into what he was doing.

      The kid never needed to figure out how to change the building plane because of all the L-brackets, hinges etc that exist in modern Lego. There is still plenty of creativity and problem-solving possible, for sure, but it's now rarer for a kid to have to figure out fundamental solutions with limited materials. IMO, that's what earlier Lego taught kids: fundamental problem solving. Mix that 'teaching' with a kid's creativity, and interesting creations are bound to happen. It's an important skill to be able to create something with the wrong tools, or no tools at all.

      It reminds me of a bit in Zen In the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The main character wants to fix a loose throttle with a shim made from an aluminum can, and his friend wants to use factory shims, which would be basically the same thing, but not currently available and costly. There's no basic understanding of the problem, and the solution is to buy some product to correct it. IMO, too many 'ideal' Lego pieces promote the same mindset.