Architecture Studio, a new set from Lego, comes with 1,210 white and translucent bricks. More notable is what it lacks: namely, instructions for any single thing you’re supposed to build with it. Instead, the kit is accompanied by a thick, 277-page guidebook filled with architectural concepts and building techniques alongside real world insights from prominent architecture studios from around the globe. In other words, this box o’ bricks is a little different. Where past Lego products might have had the happy ancillary effect of nurturing youngsters’ interest in architecture, here, that’s the entire point. Seventy-three different kinds of bricks are included in the set. But bricks are easy to find. It’s the guidebook that’s truly new. Its pages offer accessible overviews of basic architectural concepts, along with illustrated exercises for exploring them in Lego form. Pages on negative space and interior sections, for example, encourage budding builders to think not only about how their miniature creations look from the outside but also in terms of what sorts of spaces they contain within them.
That, admittedly, is a bit headier than snapping together a castle for a smiling minifig army. And the set does come with a recommendation of ages 16 and up. But if Lego products have proven anything over the years, it’s that with simple tools, young kids can prove to be surprisingly proficient designers. For a 10 or 12 or 13-year-old who’s just starting to get curious about some of the concepts involved in their structures, this could be an excellent stepping stone. The guidebook features contributions from a number of acclaimed firms, including REX, Safdie, Skidmore, MAD, and Sou Fujimoto, among others. Their real-world projects are used to bridge the gap between the clean plastic world of Lego and the one we live in. A hundred and fifty bucks for a bunch of white bricks might seem steep, but it’s hard to get mad at a product aimed squarely at encouraging kids to nurture their innate creativity in imagination. And if you’re looking for slightly more profound way of putting that, this passage from the guide book does a fine job: “It is no coincidence that Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller were all taught kindergarten in the school system that introduced building blocks into educational play.
These simple forms reveal the first traces of modernism—the start of a relationship between architecture and creative children’s games that continues to this day.”The details in this post are now superseded by a post I have made using the Brickset API. I’ve always enjoyed Lego and it’s currently experiencing a resurgence in our house thanks to strategic hinting encouragement that my children would find it fun too. (It seems like I’m not the only one) What does tend to happen though is that as sets are pulled apart played with we often need to dig out the instructions to put entire sets pieces back together again. Although I carefully file any instructions from sets we purchase, often it’s easier to download them as pdfs from the Lego website and view them on a tablet and sometimes we buy them 2nd hand without instructions so need to download them anyway. since they make it very easy to find links on the official Lego site to the particular instructions you need and also display the instructions on their own site.
As our collection of sets grew I was manually downloading a copy of the instructions for each one to store for quick reference, then I figured why not just download the whole lot for the particular ranges we are interested in, so that I’ve always got any of them. Naturally I was not going to do that manually……The download requests are submitted via a single BITS Transfer job so make good use of available bandwidth, handle network interruptions etc… Note: Some of the code in these functions requires PowerShell v3 If you already know the Lego set numbers you can use the first function Get-LegoSetInstructions like this: The files hosted on the Lego website are named with a generic number code, so I change this with each download to the name and number of the set so that they are easy to find once downloaded: website for all of the Lego sets in that range. The list of possible ranges are on the left-hand side of the site. So to get the Harry Potter range:
The Get-LegoSetInstructions function will also take hyperlinks as input, so to get an entire range of instructions downloaded you can do this:Lego Builds InstructionsLego Creations InstructionsLego Instructions IdeasInstructions SuperLego Ideas For BoysLego Ideas To BuildLego Building IdeasSnoopy GamesSnoopy LegoForwardLEGO Building Instructions – Make Snoopy and his doghouse, and there is even a Woodstock too! Oh man, this might be our new favorite LEGO project! The boys have been arguing over who gets to display it in their room, so I solved that conflict by saying that it’s mine. Gresham and I were...They have helped transform Lego into some of the most popular toys on the market and even turned its coloured bricks into valuable collectors items.But the best-selling Jurassic World and Star Wars Lego sets may be stifling children's creativity, according to a new study.Rather than traditional Lego bricks, which relied upon children's imagination to create something wonderful from a pile of plastic, the themed kits come with instructions on how to put them together.
Lego kits like the Star Wars Millennium Falcon shown above, which went on sale for £168, may stifle children's creativity according to a new study by providing them with instructions on how to build the kits rather than encouraging free play and the use of their imaginations like traditional Lego setsResearchers found that these instructions make it too easy to create spaceships and dinosaurs and did not spark any creativity in youngsters.Children who were given the traditional toy bricks without instructions were found to outperform those who had been given the sets with step-by-step instructions when they later did other creative tasks. Lego has come under fire in the past from parents who hare concerned about its specialist model building kits.They worry it takes away the pleasure and ambition involved in a child just sitting with a box of bricks and creating something from their own imagination.The debate was triggered by British blogger, Chris Swan, who complained: ‘The problem is sets that only make one thing like a dragon or something licensed from a movie.’The IT expert who was previously in the Royal Navy said: ‘Lego for me was always about creativity, remaking and improving on existing designs.
Those things don’t happen with sets that are designed to build a model of a single thing.'His views were supported by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto Professor Marit Gundersen Engeset, from the Buskerud and Vestfold University College in Norway, said: 'There are a lot of studies that explore what enhances creativity. Ours is one of the few that considers ways in which creativity may be undermined.'What we find is that a well-defined problem — in our case, following an explicit set of instructions to build something with Legos — can actually hamper creativity in solving future problems.'Lego has insisted it bricks can help to foster creativity in children by giving them the opportunity to build almost anything they want.The company's Legoland theme parks provides some idea of just how creative some people can get with entire cities built in miniature.Annual competitions also challenge youngsters, and some adults, to engineer and construct the most impressive structures they can come up with.
However, some parents have complained that the trend for themed sets where Lego kits are specially designed to be built into a specific object, often from a film, are robbing their children of that creative freedom. Researchers gave two groups of children either a set of Lego bricks without instructions or a themed kit with instructions. They were later given creative tasks and those who had been given the bricks without instructions outperformed the other group. A stock picture of children playing with Lego is shown above Lego kits, like this Death Star from the Star Wars series, have proven to be extremely popular and in many cases have become collectors items. However, they come with instructions to make it easier to build them Lego has released many different themed kits, usually based around popular movies, such as the Ghostbusters kit shown above. These helped to turn the company into one of the world's biggest toy firms Following the release of Jurassic World, Lego also released a range of specially made kits, shown aboveTo test this Professor Gundersen Engeset and her colleague Dr Page Moreau from the University of Wisconsin, whose research is published in the Journal of Marketing Research, gave some young subjects complete sets of the toy bricks with step-by-step instructions while others were left to build what they like.