We started out with a tour of Lego House. This place is amazing. (I think the only not amazing thing was how busy it was on Saturday.) Stuart, one of the tour leaders, is one of the main model builders and gave half the tour.
We started out at the tree.
There are several branches that can hold scenes. I missed the space one, but the astronaut from "The Martian". They put some messages in it and my favorite was "we come in pieces."
Then we saw the dinosaurs in the top portion. They were awesome, and we found out that on Easter one of each egg had hatched. (If you look at the dinosaur lego set, there are still two eggs.)
There is the Duplo dino, who is the most fun. There are animals making up a lot of his detail.
There is the normal Lego dino, who has a lot of color texture and much smoother lines than many Lego sculptures. But at the end of the day, we saw so many cool things out of Lego that he was just normal. The baby was pretty cute though!
All the adults are also stepping on a Lego block, like all poor parents.
The last one is Technic Dino.
The room that the dinosaurs are in is a giant brick. The skylights are the studs and the lights are the inside cylinders. This was a change suggested by the Lego community so that if aliens come they will know what the building is.
The whole building is centered around play, and does a great job of combining learning with play (a core value, that we heard several times.) I forget what the red competency is, but it is basically free play. There are three different areas. An area by the waterfall with all sorts of bricks and this produces very detailed designs. There is an area with only 2x4 bricks, and this starts to make more pixelated, less detailed designs. The last area is one that only has yellow 2x4 bricks and this makes very large, abstract designs. The other thing to note is that they never take down all of the creations. That leaves the slate too blank and kids don't know what to do. Also, if they leave some up they often find that other people will make another creation that goes with it.
The blue area had a test track, a city builder, and a robot game (not shown yet). The test track was what is found in many Lego areas.
The city builder was super cool. You get a little square, you make the type of building on it (i.e., if you have a green square you make a park, if you have a red square you make an apartment) and then you put it on a light table. There are little people running around, looking for different things, and if you put it near them you get a star and all the people come to use it.
Green area: an amazing miniland and a stop motion video maker
(This is a robot tearing down a building.)
The yellow section (emotions) had a flower making area and a fish making area.
The fish area you would make a fish, scan it, and then it would swim in the tank. Every two or three minutes there would be an animation, and you would empathize with your fish. The first animation said it was feeding time and all the little fish we had made circled up and wiggled excitedly. Then the big manta ray came and ate all the food and now I might be scarred for life I was so sad for our little fish.
Back to the room for the unveiling of this years special insider tour set (that most people knew about.)
But first! A quick presentation about building instructions (which I found very interesting) and sustainability (which I also found very interesting). They are looking at ways to move away from the poly-bags that are in all the boxes. We got to see some of the things they've tried; it's mostly paper. But with paper you need to worry about the bricks poking holes in the bag. Put on a plastic coating? Well, that seems to defeat the point. How many holes are ok? They are also looking at ways to make more environmentally friendly Lego bricks.
They then talked a lot about the making of our Lego set. Stuart was the designer, but there was a lot of history involved in it too. There used to be a page about the history, but now the only thing I can find is the original picture. (From https://www.lego.com/r/www/r/catalogs/-/media/catalogs/articles/lego%20history/article%20photos/company/8%20early%20expansion/systemhouse_inauguration_1958-original.jpg)
The coolest parts of the set are 1) They are very limited editions. 2) There is a unique to this set part. It was made using 3D printing as they wanted to see if a different technique for making the element could be used. Since it was a low volume run, it was a good time to try it out. 3) Our picture is on the back. This means that we'll be in the Lego archives! I apparently didn't take a picture at the time, so here are some more recent ones.
(And so that I can remember who signed where...)
Then farewell to the leaders.
A few more photos, a survey, getting the boxes signed, and such.
We met a bunch of lovely people, but the ones that we seemed to click the most with were Alice (US) and Birgit (Austria)...
...and Emma and Mark (Australia).
Well, this is turning into a long post. I just decided to turn it into two.
1 comment:
Awesome! I especially love the dino stepping on a Lego! 😂
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