Remember the LEGO CubeDude craze from a couple of years ago? It all started with PIXAR-animator and LEGO-fan Angus McLane uploading over one hundred of his brick-built LEGO figures on Flickr towards the end of 2009. He called them CubeDudes. The stocky, adorable, and easily recognizable characters became instant favorites and everyone started building their own versions of CubeDudes. The LEGO CubeDudes became so popular that LEGO collaborated with Angus to release two special LEGO CubeDude sets (both Star Wars themed) available only at Star Wars and comics conventions. Although the CubeDude-mania cooled off, building CubeDudes remains an excellent way to challenge yourself and expand your LEGO building skills. CubeDudes don’t require you to have a large LEGO collection, but they teach you interesting and advanced building skills – usually only available in large and complex LEGO sets. They are kind of like a puzzle, and once you get a hang of the design-concept, you can create your own CubeDudes. F
rom then on, only your own imagination is the limit… So how do you star building CubeDudes if you don’t own one of the limited-edition CubeDude LEGO sets? Fortunately members at Brickset reverse-engineered the CubeDude characters included in the sets and made the instructions available for download. These instructions will allow you build your first CubeDudes. (You can download the PDF instruction by clicking on the images below.) Once you build a few CubeDudes, I would recommend you head over to Angus’ Flickr gallery to check out his other designs. He has CubeDudes characters from movies, cartoons, comics, games, etc. There is also a LEGO CubeDudes Group Gallery where other people share their CubeDudes. I’m sure you will get some ideas of what you would like to build next. 😉 And if you feel like you missed out and would like to get the limited edition CubeDude sets, you can usually find some listed on eBay. There are also listings for some pretty nice custom Cube Dudes you might like:
Do you have your own CubeDude designs? You can share them in the comment section below. We would love to see them! 🙂 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.