You (or someone you know) can pay & pick up online orders at a Kmart store - and even use an international credit card. U.S. shipping & delivery Get your order shipped or delivered to any address in the United States - including hotels. Via Sears, we ship to over 100 countries, so you can have your order shipped back home. Kmart International Online Shopping If you are planning to visit the United States, or have friends and family here, shop at Kmart to get everything you want - including gifts for yourself or others. Shopping online in the USA at Kmart couldn't be easier. You can pay for your order in a store or even use an international credit card. Once you place an order, you (or someone you know) can pick it up at a Kmart store, have it shipped or delivered to a U.S. address, and even have it shipped to over 100 countries - whatever is most convenient for you. There are many of us—errr, people—who build stuff with Legos at all ages. Having grown up with loads of hand-me-down Legos (and having a Lego Wall-E sitting on my desk right now), I started to wonder how Legos evolved from the sets I remember from my childhood to what they are today.
As an analyst, I turned to data for answers. I found a dataset on Rebrickable (a site that shows you which Lego sets you can build from the sets and pieces you already own), which contained information on the color, number, and type of pieces in each Lego set for the past 67 years. I used Plotly and Mode Python Notebooks to explore the data. Like a baseplate, scatterplots make a good foundation for building analysis. I took a look at Lego sets through the years broken down by the most basic of Lego metrics—how many pieces are in the set. Mouse over a data point for information about a particular set. Highlight an area to zoom in. To see the complete Python notebook generating this plot, click here. Is it fair to say sets are bigger now than they used to be? While the number of sets released each year have generally increased, there’s a conspicuous dip from 2004-2009. Those years represent a difficult period for The Lego Group, when the company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy before picking up the pieces.
There’s an interesting disparity between the annual mean and median pieces per set. While the mean pieces per set continues to grow, the median pieces per set remains fairly consistent over time (around 50-100 pieces). This indicates that while there are roughly an equal ratio of sets above and below 75 (plus or minus 25) pieces each year, something is happening with the volume of pieces to drive up the mean. The box plot shows that the number of pieces per set has become more widely distributed over time. The first quartile (25th percentile) doesn’t change much decade to decade, but the third quartile (75th percentile) has grown steadily. This signals that the increasing mean is driven by sets that were already above the median—or put simply, big sets have gotten bigger while small sets have stayed about the same size. The 95th percentile of sets more than doubled in pieces from the 1970s to today. This outpaces the 90th percentile, which grew 80%, as well as the 75th percentile, which grew 37% over the same period.
This trend is particularly evident at the top. Until 1985, Lego’s biggest set was still under 1000 pieces (the 973-piece U.S.S. Constellation). Today’s biggest set (the 5922-piece Taj Majal) is six times bigger. Legos have gotten darker, with white giving way to black and gray. The transition from the old grays to the current bluish grays (or “bley”) is a hot-button topic for many Lego fans. Perhaps not surprisingly, Lego’s color palette has expanded over the decades. Until the 1990s, almost every piece was one of the top ten colors; now only about 80% are. The remainder of pieces outside the top ten consists of a growing long tail of many minor colors. I decided to switch up the visualization tool for this chart—it was made with Apple Numbers. Color palettes help define set themes. Some colors really pop out, like the orange of SpongeBob’s and Prince of Persia sets, and lime from the Power Miners series. Source: Bikini Bottom Undersea Party via Lego and Good Neighbours at Bikini Bottom via Brickset
Source: Scorpion Pyramid and Battle of Alamut via Brickset Source: Underground Mining Station, Titanium Command Rig, and Boulder Blaster via Brickset The Lego universe can be thought of as a network in which sets that share many of the same pieces have strong connections, whereas sets that only share a few pieces have weak connections. I defined the connection score for two sets as the number of shared pieces over the total number of pieces between the two sets. In (Lego) set theory, that formula would look something like this: #(x ∩ y) / #(x ∪ y) Each circle (or node in network-diagram-speak) in the visualization below represents a Lego set theme. The size of the circle represents the total number of pieces in a theme’s sets; the color shown is the color that makes up the most pieces in that theme. By clicking and dragging the circles, you can explore how closely one theme is connected to others. To see the HTML powering this network diagram, click here.
It was built in Mode using this D3.js library. A few smaller themes—including Hobby Sets, Dinosaurs, and Fusion—share a high percentage of their pieces (and therefore have strong connections) with many other themes. Bionicle and Technic (two mechanical themes) don’t share a strong connection directly, but end up close together by virtue of each of them sharing strong connections with Spybotics and Znap. Finally, I wanted a way to represent each year’s Lego sets. I thought about the summary for each year as a combination of color and set size (median pieces). To determine the essential color for each year, I chose the most dominant color (by number of pieces) in the most sets. All this Lego analysis had me eager to build something, so I recreated the above chart with Legos. Want to join in on the fun? Explore Rebrickable’s data for yourself in Mode’s public warehouse.You really can't guarantee how your children will play. All kids are different. Some kids never build the sets according to the instructions, others ONLY build using instructions.
And some are in between.The trick is figuring out how to inspire your kids into being creative and productive with LEGO. Some kids need no inspiration at all. They see the new Star Wars toys or Power Rangers or what-have-you, and they want to build new vehicles and bases for them. You didn't have to do anything. Others need you to plant an idea in their heads and give them some praise or encouragement. Some kids need YOU to build with them and lead the process.Otherwise, don't worry about the size of the pieces. That doesn't really do anything. In fact, the smaller pieces are often better for building smaller and more creative details. Pieces like these are small and great:In fact, usually, I find that the BIG pieces are the ones that are terrible for creativity (although there aren't any parts that aren't useful in some way). I never liked these that much (for example):What makes a piece useful is generally how "specific" to a purpose it looks. If it looks generic, it's a good piece.
If you look at it and immediately know what sort of thing it goes to, it's probably not a great piece.First off, I wouldn't take anything away from them. Don't take away the "non-creative" pieces, don't take away their instructions. That's a parenting call, of course, but I would deem that too intrusive. If you have to resort to that, your kids probably just aren't meant to play with LEGO the way you want them to.I'd probably start with rules about how long a set can stay together. When it comes time for a set that they've built from instructions to get put away (after a few days or weeks, depending), it's time to take it apart completely and put it in the "LEGO bin". That will encourage them to have a bin full of LEGO that's mixed up rather than keeping their assembled sets lying around. It's an inspiration resource to have a bunch of disassembled pieces rather than assembled models.Also, I'd buy them The Right Sets.Story-based sets like Ninjago, Chima, Nexo Knights, Star Wars, etc., aren't usually as good.
So don't buy these (or, buy fewer of them):Instead, buy sets that have a lot of generic pieces in them. Buy these instead:Also, as suggested earlier, if they need additional motivation, build with them yourself. Think of a fun project for both yourself and them and build it. Lead the project yourself, but have them do various tasks and make something together.I'm not sure how old are your kids. If they are young < 3 years old. Let them play with the bigger blocks/Duplo.If they are older children - give them all the blocks available for them to express their creativity. Personally, I grew up in an environment, where my parents, do not often buy me toys other than LEGO. As such, I build my own transformers, Voltron etc.With my eldest boy, now 6. He builds new sets with instructions, and we will dismantle the older sets for bricks to free-build. Most of the time he needs no prompting, and he'll just go about building things he likes, which mostly revolves around planes.As David Eaton mentioned in his post.
"Plant an idea in their heads""give praise/encouragement""Build with them"As a parent, I do all of those, and his advice resonates with me.Let your child start with something simple. Ask for them to build you a car; Sometimes, they might just surprise you with their creativity, especially when working with a limited number/type of bricks.Happen to write about of building LEGO months back, without instruction sets and how I felt LEGO helped in my child's development.LEGO with Benefits Have fun, building with your child!I think this is a great question, because open-ended play where kids stretch and exercise their imagination and creativity is JUST as important as play in which they learn about following rules and guidelines. My suggestion is to make both of these types of play available to your kids, and let them choose. Every child is different and likes different kinds of play - no constructive play should be actively discouraged - but give them options where they can build without instructions.
If they don’t respond well to having the LEGO instructions taken away from them, there are certainly lots of other LEGO alternatives out there which have the same style of play but are designed to be more open-ended / instruction-free.The whole point of LEGOs is for children to use their imaginations. Those kits with their instructions sort of defeat that purpose so if the instructions are gone then that just makes them better. I would gather all of the LEGO pieces together and pull them all apart and then separate the plain blocks from the special ones and put them in separate bowls. Then, pick a time when the kids are bored and bring them out. Sit down with them and start building your own thing. Encourage them to help you. Pretty soon they'll be adding their own elements to your creation and then after that they'll build their own. If you've got boys, you can add some toy cars or figures to the mix and have them build a garage or a race track, a cage for the animals, a fort, whatever.