It's not very often that you meet a kid who doesn't love Legos. The allure of these little building blocks is perfectly simple: Whatever a kid wants to play with, Legos will allow them to play with it.
A bucket of Legos can become a fortified castle for a band of Noble Knights, or a two story dream house for a happy family. You can create a pirate ship for seafaring adventure, or a spacecraft for extraterrestrial exploration. The company puts out any number of themed sets. Most recently, the big hits have been Batman and Star Wars Lego [http://www.yogee.com.au/] toys, but the sheer customizability of these sets allows the Star Wars ships to be rebuilt into giant robots, while the bricks meant to create Gotham City become a futuristic metropolis where the giant robot can wreck havoc and tear down skyscrapers as the Time Travelling Swordsmen from the Medieval set attempt to bring the mechanical monster to his knees.
This kind of playfulness does a world of good for young minds. The obvious benefit is, yeah, it helps them learn to be creative, but what's more, it teaches children how to see their ideas come to life.
If you want to build a seven story tower out of these little clicky bricks, it's not enough to just come up with the idea and throw some bricks together. You have to play around with them until you get an idea of how to put the bricks together in such a way that the tower won't topple the minute it's completed. If you want to build something with moving parts, you have to figure out how to use all the little hinges and swivels and other doodads to allow it to move without compromising how sturdy it is.
In a broad sense, this teaches one of the fundamental facts of life: You can do anything you want, but you first have to learn how it's done, and if it's never been done before, you need to invent a practical way of doing it.
Creativity and imagination are very important, but equally important are the skills to see ideas come to life. This is where items like Legos, Mega Bloks, and even those Fisher Price Little People Builder Sets really excel.
With all of these toys, there's a definite learning process. When you start with your first Lego set, you'll have about one million and one different ideas for things to build, from small buildings to vast spaceships, and you'll probably have a hard time figuring out how to keep the more ambitious projects from tumbling into a loose pile of bricks and blocks. So you start small, building little things at first, and as you learn how to provide your projects with the right structure, how to create a solid kind of architecture for your inventions, you can get to work on that robotic T-Rex you had in mind.
And therein lies the very first thing you need to learn if you hope to succeed: You can go anywhere you want, but you have to chart the course, first.
A bucket of Legos can become a fortified castle for a band of Noble Knights, or a two story dream house for a happy family. You can create a pirate ship for seafaring adventure, or a spacecraft for extraterrestrial exploration. The company puts out any number of themed sets. Most recently, the big hits have been Batman and Star Wars Lego [http://www.yogee.com.au/] toys, but the sheer customizability of these sets allows the Star Wars ships to be rebuilt into giant robots, while the bricks meant to create Gotham City become a futuristic metropolis where the giant robot can wreck havoc and tear down skyscrapers as the Time Travelling Swordsmen from the Medieval set attempt to bring the mechanical monster to his knees.
This kind of playfulness does a world of good for young minds. The obvious benefit is, yeah, it helps them learn to be creative, but what's more, it teaches children how to see their ideas come to life.
If you want to build a seven story tower out of these little clicky bricks, it's not enough to just come up with the idea and throw some bricks together. You have to play around with them until you get an idea of how to put the bricks together in such a way that the tower won't topple the minute it's completed. If you want to build something with moving parts, you have to figure out how to use all the little hinges and swivels and other doodads to allow it to move without compromising how sturdy it is.
In a broad sense, this teaches one of the fundamental facts of life: You can do anything you want, but you first have to learn how it's done, and if it's never been done before, you need to invent a practical way of doing it.
Creativity and imagination are very important, but equally important are the skills to see ideas come to life. This is where items like Legos, Mega Bloks, and even those Fisher Price Little People Builder Sets really excel.
With all of these toys, there's a definite learning process. When you start with your first Lego set, you'll have about one million and one different ideas for things to build, from small buildings to vast spaceships, and you'll probably have a hard time figuring out how to keep the more ambitious projects from tumbling into a loose pile of bricks and blocks. So you start small, building little things at first, and as you learn how to provide your projects with the right structure, how to create a solid kind of architecture for your inventions, you can get to work on that robotic T-Rex you had in mind.
And therein lies the very first thing you need to learn if you hope to succeed: You can go anywhere you want, but you have to chart the course, first.