Lego for creativity? I'm having doubts

Tombo2001

My kids loved lego when they were younger; Duplo is a really versatile toy.

They also love playing with the lego I had when I was a kid, in my parents house.

However, anytime we buy a 'set' - they just build the set, it either gets put up on a shelf as a display or it gets broken up into bits, never to be played with again. This is the Lego City or Lego Friends or Lego Star Wars etc.....

Lego has this unassailable reputation as being great for creativity;

But when I really think about - contemporary lego is not versatile at all.

The pieces are too small, too bitty, too particular to whatever model or design they come with. Kids don't use to make 'random stuff'......the pieces don't lend itself to that.... I'm beginning to question whether it deserves its great reputation.

The toys look great when built; but I just don't see any imagination or creativity at work when they are playing with it. Its just 'follow the instructions' and that's it.....Given how much it costs (a lot!!) I am beginning to question why we buy this stuff.

Any thoughts folks?

Jack Killian

Tombo2001 wrote: »

My kids loved lego when they were younger; Duplo is a really versatile toy.

They also love playing with the lego I had when I was a kid, in my parents house.

However, anytime we buy a 'set' - they just build the set, it either gets put up on a shelf as a display or it gets broken up into bits, never to be played with again. This is the Lego City or Lego Friends or Lego Star Wars etc.....

Lego has this unassailable reputation as being great for creativity;

But when I really think about - contemporary lego is not versatile at all.

The pieces are too small, too bitty, too particular to whatever model or design they come with. Kids don't use to make 'random stuff'......the pieces don't lend itself to that.... I'm beginning to question whether it deserves its great reputation.

The toys look great when built; but I just don't see any imagination or creativity at work when they are playing with it. Its just 'follow the instructions' and that's it.....Given how much it costs (a lot!!) I am beginning to question why we buy this stuff.

Any thoughts folks?

Agreed.

There are / used to be lots of "bits" that can be repurposed and reused for creativity, but the branded parts are too flimsy and too specific to support this aspect, turning Lego into an IKEA- or Airfix- "kit", often no better than the parts that come in a Kinder egg.

looksee

Totally agree. A bucket of bricks and roof bits, construction stuff, and a few generic people are much better. All these highly specialised kits are, as you say, not at all creative.

livedadream

maybe dont buy a set thats designed to be made into something specific?

just buy a bag of leogs and let them make what they want

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LEGO-Classic-10692-Creative-Bricks/dp/B00NVDOWUW/ref=sr_1_1?s=kids&ie=UTF8&qid=1466507305&sr=1-1&keywords=lego

some kids are creative some arnt...

Tombo2001

livedadream wrote: »

maybe dont buy a set thats designed to be made into something specific?

just buy a bag of leogs and let them make what they want

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LEGO-Classic-10692-Creative-Bricks/dp/B00NVDOWUW/ref=sr_1_1?s=kids&ie=UTF8&qid=1466507305&sr=1-1&keywords=lego

some kids are creative some arnt...

I'd dispute that. All kids are creative.

I know you can buy a bag of bricks; but the marketing push of Lego that you see in all the stores and online is very much around themed lego.

livedadream

Tombo2001 wrote: »

I'd dispute that. All kids are creative.

okay...
some are sporty, some like art, some dont. its the same as adults... every kid is different.

its not a bad thing.

to be fair you are the one complaining your kids cant make stuff other than whats shown on the box...

why not encourage them to be creative and play with the completed millennium falcon or whatever it is theyve made...

Tombo2001

livedadream wrote: »

okay...
some are sporty, some like art, some dont. its the same as adults... every kid is different.

its not a bad thing.

to be fair you are the one complaining your kids cant make stuff other than whats shown on the box...

why not encourage them to be creative and play with the completed millennium falcon or whatever it is theyve made...

Understood.

What I'm complaining about is that Lego as a toy used to lend itself to creativity; I think nowadays it doesn't at akk, but it is still seen as 'the toy' to get for creativity.

Akrasia

I don't buy those kits that are only meant to make one thing. I buy the boxes of different bricks and let the kids design their own creations.

Whenever someone buys one of those specialised sets (for birthdays or whatever) I'll make the kit with the kids and then they play with it until tit inevitably gets broken, and then those parts go back into the bucket of bricks so they can be used to make something different later

I have a nephew who has dozens of the lego sets that he got through the years. His father made most of them for him and now they're on a shelf and nobody's allowed to play with them in case any pieces go missing

I don't get it.
Toys are meant to be played with.

livedadream

i see what your saying but i honestly think it does...

your imagination or creativeness is what you make of it.

remember when kids are toddlers and you get them that fancy toy and in reality they end up playing with the box?

lego build a blocks what ever you want to call it, are great if your kid has the drive and imagination to do stuff with them

yes the new boxes that come as sets to specifically build are more rigid but adults are the buyers in the situation.

its like the difference between a colouring book and crayons and just a pile of blank paper and crayons...

your only limited to what you let limit you.

Akrasia

livedadream wrote: »

i see what your saying but i honestly think it does...

your imagination or creativeness is what you make of it.

remember when kids are toddlers and you get them that fancy toy and in reality they end up playing with the box?

lego build a blocks what ever you want to call it, are great if your kid has the drive and imagination to do stuff with them

yes the new boxes that come as sets to specifically build are more rigid but adults are the buyers in the situation.

its like the difference between a colouring book and crayons and just a pile of blank paper and crayons...

your only limited to what you let limit you.

A colouring book is an outline, the child still gets to decide what colours to use. Lego sets, are more like paint by numbers than colouring books, because the only way to make them is to put every piece exactly where you're told to


There's nothing wrong with this, model building is perfectly fine as a past time, but it's not imaginative play.
Lego, is still a great brand though. It can teach patience and concentration and spatial awareness and attention to detail, and when the kids get older there are kits like lego technics and lego Mindstorms that are really educational engineering toys

Dardania

I'm reading a book at the moment about data analysis, and one of the topics covered is Lego, and how in the early 2000s they changed their strategy from that of random blocks (which encourages creativity, and ultimately wasn't selling enough) to the massive kits that they now sell.

Apparently the reason is to attract more attention addled children, with all their various modern distractions, to give them a difficult, demanding task that they can be proud of, to display on a wall.

Interesting idea: reduce creativity and encourage sticking with something long enough to achieve it. Not my memory of Lego - although to be fair my age for Lego was younger when I wouldn't have been able to attempt such large complex ones...

Apparently minecraft is great for encouraging creativity - I read an article where it gained popularity with children screaming for a creative outlet

Oafley Jones

Dardania wrote: »

I'm reading a book at the moment about data analysis, and one of the topics covered is Lego, and how in the early 2000s they changed their strategy from that of random blocks (which encourages creativity, and ultimately wasn't selling enough) to the massive kits that they now sell.

Apparently the reason is to attract more attention addled children, with all their various modern distractions, to give them a difficult, demanding task that they can be proud of, to display on a wall.

Interesting idea: reduce creativity and encourage sticking with something long enough to achieve it. Not my memory of Lego - although to be fair my age for Lego was younger when I wouldn't have been able to attempt such large complex ones...

Apparently minecraft is great for encouraging creativity - I read an article where it gained popularity with children screaming for a creative outlet

I'm curious as to what book that is because the narrative you give is a bit off. The Lego story is the cautionary story of the 2000s that's taught at business school. Today Lego is the biggest toy company in the world, but at the start of century Lego was going out of business. Literally. How did they end up in this position? They bet on the future while abandoning what them great. Simply they diversified away from their core product. Studies showed that kids hated building lego and just wanted to play with the sets. They reasoned that with the ascent of computer games, that little pieces of plastic were no longer going to hold a child's interest. They invested heavily in computer games. The sets were massively reduced in complexity, part count and highly specific elements were introduced. Costs had run out of control - Lego had a fibre optic element in a single set that cost more to manufacture than the entire set retailed for. It was a disaster.

Two high profile CEOs (both with fantastic reputations in rescuing companies) were appointed and did nothing. Then in 2004 Jorgen Vig Knudstorp was appointed at the ripe old age of 34. He reasoned that Lego had lost its way, that in order to gain success that the company needed a return to its core values and products. That the product had to capture a child imagination. Fans, people who grew up with Lego were appointed designers and consultants. The other pillar was IPs. TLG signed a deal with Lucasfilms to produce Star Wars sets. They followed with Harry Potter. These were incredibly successful.

Yes there are still far more unique elements in a city set than there was when I was a kid in the 80s, but there's a far bigger offering in basic blocks as well. You've the Classic range of sets, which are large tubs of mostly basic bricks with windows etc. You've Pick a Brick, where you can order precisely what you want.
The argument that Lego has lost it's creatively is one of those lazy stories that pops up from time to time in news articles and it just never really stands up.

ConorDon97

When I was younger I would just buy the set and make something completely different out of it, never used instructions. I would imagine you can still get boxes of random pieces to make whatever you want?

That said, they really market the "sets" more than anything else.

Tombo2001

Oafley Jones wrote: »

The argument that Lego has lost it's creatively is one of those lazy stories that pops up from time to time in news articles and it just never really stands up.

If you are talking about Lego as a company, yes its creative.

As a product...

Take a look at the link below



This is a product I had when I was a kid. You can tell just by looking at it that you can use it for one big ship, or four small ships, you can use the radar for different things etc etc.....

Compare that to the millinium falcon above, I just don't see it being used in the same way.

What has been referenced above is my experience of lego with my kids. Its not a lazy story, to be honest I've just been disappointed with it as a toy.

As a company highly commercial and highly successful. But as a product, it seems to be all about getting you to buy the next model.

As outlined earlier - it gives kids "a difficult, demanding task that they can be proud of" but once you do one "difficult demanding task" - great you are proud of it as a child. But then you do a second and then a third, and its always just "follow the instructions and you end up with whats in the picture", after a while that doesn't motivate kids any more.

And yes, I know you can buy the bucket with bricks. But all the lego marketing is leading you towards the models.

MistyCheese

I agree regarding the sets. It's more like 'build this toy then play with it'. If you're looking for Lego to be used more in that 'make anything you can think of' way you need to get plainer pieces of just different shapes and colours of regular Lego and some pieces like hinges, wheels, I'm not good at describing the pieces, I'll link to a picture of what I'm taking about:

http://www.moc-pages.com/35/35-pieces-LEGO-pieces.jpg

IvyTheTerrible

You can still buy boxes of random lego bits (I've bought them for my son), he makes up all sorts of stories and pretend play with them. And as mentioned earlier, sets get mixed in.

LegacyUser

When my son was 2 I bought him his first duplo set and from the get go he loved it.

He is almost 5 now and has a massive box of the duplo and a massive box of the small lego. He makes the sets up the first time, sometimes with help, other times without.

What I started doing is colour coordinating the lego into boxes, ie all red in one box, all wheels in one box and all little figures in another. He will sit for hours making his own things with them. He never recreates the original once he has broken it. I sometimes sit with him and make my own thing and he does the same. Only recently he made a little lego garden for our "fairy door". I was well impressed.

I think it helped separating the lego as he finds the pieces much more easily.

LegacyUser

There are lots of Lego clubs (both official and unoffical) that are making amazing things with Lego both adults and kids. Lego themselves are very involved with clubs and give them free Lego. My friend runs one in New York for all ages, they pick themes each month (like "gardens" or "under the sea"), they get assorted bricks from lego because they are an official club and the organizers bring their own bricks as well and its just bog standard bricks in different colours. People make the most amazing creations. I gave him a photo of a boat I sailed on and he built it from scratch just based on a few photos.

Lego is what you make of it - if you buy sets then you make the set but Lego actually only make a limited number of pieces so all the sets are pretty much made up of the same bricks. The cost of making new molds is high so you'll see super fans get excited when a new set comes out and they see a new shape or an existing shape in a new colour. There are Lego clubs in Ireland and plenty of online groups. The youtube lego animation films can be amazing and a good outlet for kids who maybe are as creative at building outside of the plans.

WildWater

I think Lego is a brilliant toy. Yes the set are designed for following instructions to build a particular model. There's no creativity in that but it's still a good activity for them and a certain skill in itself. But in our home shortly after the model is built it is demolished and the creativity really beings.

At this stage we have a huge pile (its actually well organised by colour) of Lego that the kids use for free play. They have built some really creative models, invented their own games and have spent hours & hours playing with it. Like a lot of things it comes in fits and starts. They could go weeks without going near it and then suddenly it is all about the lego again.

But IMO the real crime with Lego is being too precious about it. Smash up that model mix it in with three more and get creative.

mohawk

My son is obsessed with Lego. We buy the set it gets built once and then he breaks it up and builds his own creations. He always has some Lego project on the go. He likes the sets for the people be it pirates, superheroes, astronauts etc.

Some kids are proud of the original build and others want to build crazy stuff that defies the laws of physics.