The Learning Power of Lego [Infographic]

Ole Kirk Christiansen created Legos in the 1940s in Denmark. Ole’s company originally sold and made wooden stepladders and ironing boards, until he started making wooden toys. The toys were more popular, so he decided to sell toys exclusively. He named the company LEGO, which came from the Danish phrase “play well“.

Lego bricks have withstood the test of time because of their unlimited open-ended possibilities - 400 billion bricks have been produced since 1958. Lego has been going strong for the last sixty years, developing children’s creativity, fine motor skills, teamwork, and curiosity. Who knows what the next fifty years will bring!

Check out this infographic to learn some history of LEGO and how it’s being used in the education field.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via: onlinecollege

Lego Man in Space

Two Canadian high school students have successfully launched a Lego man almost 80,000 feet above sea level high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.

The two teens, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed, were inspired to do the project about a year and a half ago when Ho saw a YouTube video of MIT students who sent a balloon to near space. Ho wanted to see if he could do it too.


Via: LA Times

Lego Model of The Large Hadron Collider

A physicist from the University of Copenhagen has spent over 80 hours of work and over $2,600 to built a Large Hadron Collider model out of 9,500 LEGOs. The Lego LHC is a 1:50 scale model of the real thing, making the minifig scientists close to scale with real people.

As we write, scientists are trying to find out whether the elusive Higgs boson particle was glimpsed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, fueling huge excitement. If the particle, also known as the God particle, was actually there,
it will make physics history.

The LHC scientists do not yet have enough data to claim a discovery. But in the meantime, at home in Copenhagen, one physicist Sascha Mehlhase from the Niels Bohr Institute has made a part of the collider, the Atlas detector, out of LEGO toy bricks.

World's Tallest Lego Christmas Tree in London

A giant Lego Christmas tree has been unveiled at London's St Pancras station, the tallest tree ever built with the toy bricks, Lego has confirmed that its the worlds tallest tree ever constructed using just Lego alone.

Spanning 10-meters tall, the project utilizes 600,000 Lego bricks to compose 172 branches. 1200 Christmas balls, also composed of LEGOs, were assembled by Elementary School children before being hung from the sculpture.

After two months of arduous construction, the tree is now on display in the main station at St. Pancras.














Source: thesun

Lego Batman Batcave

You’ve got to be an expert at both LEGO-craft and Batman architecture to create a masterwork like this. And Alex Schranz is clearly both. He used around 9000 Lego parts to build this 68-brick high Batcave replica, complete with Batman figure modded to scale and a neon lamp in the back illuminate all that glorious detail.

Working Lego HK UMP .45

An ingenious Maker put together HK UMP .45 sub-machine gun out of Legos. Powered by rubber bands, it also fires a 15 lego clip full of the same.


Source: mocpages

Literary Legos

Is there anything that hasn’t been created from Lego bricks? Fine Clonier ran a contest that invited people to create historical figures out of Legos. Mark Twain below was the overall contest winner. Bookalicious recently posted some of the literary figures featured in the contest.
















Source: flickr

Lego Bugatti Veyron

A Bugatti Veyron with working brakes and 7-speed gear box. Doesn't get much nerdier than this.

Fully functional LEGO Sniper Rifle

All mechanical… made by Jack Treat. For more details click here.

Lego Crawler Town

I don't think I've ever seen as unique a Lego creation as this "eco punk" mobile town, created by Dave DeGobbi. As it should, Crawler Town has its own little backstory:

Crawler town roams the barren wastes of a post steam-punk world after cataclysmic climate change do to excessive coal use. Several such cities exist but Crawler town is the most popular due to the Aero 500 hydrogen fuel cell Air races that are held. Many people travel the wastes to Crawler town for vacation and to enjoy rare luxuries like Pizza, fresh vegetables and Beer. Travelling the wastes in search of minerals and aquifers ( vital for survival) the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes.

Computer-Controlled LEGO Airbus A380

While the Lego Airbus A380 at Legoland is the biggest Lego airplane out there, this one is much cooler. To start with, there are snakes inside, along with five other movie scenes. And then, it's computer-controlled, using a touchscreen.

The PC program running on the touch screen controls eight Mindstorm NXT engines and six hitechnic servos, which in turn can retract the gear, open cargo doors, move the flaps, raise the air brakes, activate the landing lights, move the tail fin, and throttle the engines, among other actions.






































Source: thebrickman