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LEGO House Building Activities

Almost anyone who has played with a set of LEGO bricks will have put together some variation of the standard house design; front door in the middle, two windows either side, chimney on the slopping roof. However, LEGO offers a lot more opportunities for creativity and learning than this and can be used to explore math, architecture and design. Indeed, it is not only young children who can benefit from modelling with LEGO but older children and even college students as well.
  1. Reconstructing and Imagining Famous Houses

    • Use pictures, or even better, architectural plans to recreate famous houses. The White House is perhaps the most obvious idea, though number 10 Downing Street, or Fallingwater are also a good candidates. If you don't fancy building something from a plan then get creative and try houses from fiction or songs. What would the House of the Rising Sun look like? Or the ginger bread house from Hansel and Gretel? Work out how you would represent this with LEGO bricks and build it. This activity is mainly for younger children, though older children and adults could also find satisfaction in the process by working at greater levels of accuracy and detail.

    Architecture Through the Ages

    • This is an activity for high school students studying design or even as an introductory activity for first year architecture undergraduates. Have them investigate and make a presentation about changes in architectural styles through the ages by making a selection of LEGO houses based on different styles. They will need to build quite big, perhaps over the standard LEGO scale, in order to show defining details such as arch and window shapes. They may also need a large selection of bricks with the smooth, angled tops in order to make the shapes of the features clear.

    Building From Plans

    • A good challenge for students in middle or high school is to use a complicated set of architectural blueprints to build a LEGO house which matches the blueprints as closely as possible. Incorporate a number of floors, stairs and landings in the design to stimulate thinking in three dimensions. Whether you include the studs on the bricks within the plan is up to you. Omitting them and giving only measurements will create more of a challenge. Be sure to check that you have all the necessary parts to make the design which you give, or you may find the builders get seriously frustrated with the architect.

    Space and Materials

    • Part of being a designer is knowing how to produce a design with as little wastage of materials as possible. Come up with a design brief for a house which gives certain specifications, such as the number of rooms, the floorspace and location of each room, ceiling height etc. Challenge students to build a house which fulfills all the criteria necessary using as few bricks and boards as possible. Make sure that the specifications are not so strict that they destroy any opportunity for creativity, but at the same time make sure that they incorporate some interesting restrictions. Depending on the level of complexity in the blueprint, this can make a good challenge for anyone from high school age to an undergraduate in college.


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