Lego Class #9 - It's Amaze - ing!

Remember those little handheld mazes with the little silver ball that you used to play with as a kid?  That was the topic of our class today.  We used our Lego Bricks to create a maze that we could navigate a Skittle through!  Once we got a basic maze built, I challenged the class to build a maze with a tunnel.  It was a fun - and deliciously sweet - class!  

Lego Class #8 - Step on it!

In today's class, we focused on how sturdy Lego Bricks can really be.  We watched a short film about a man who built an entire house out of Lego!  The video can be seen here:

James May's House Made of Lego

We also learned that a 2 X 2 Lego piece can withstand 950 pounds!  That's amazing!  We decided to put our Lego bricks to the test and see if we could build a Lego box that we could stand on.  In some cases, it took a couple tries, but I believe one student was able to build a structure 8 bricks high that could be stood on.  I imagine if we had more bricks, we could have made it higher!  We did learn that the smaller your feet, the easier it is to build it!  Here are some pictures from class:

A 2×2 Lego brick can hold a staggering 950lbs (432kg), or 375,000 bricks.
Read more at http://www.megatechnews.com/engineers-in-uk-discover-how-much-weight-a-lego-brick-can-hold/#ilmlGBBebrrIotJP.99

Lego Class #7 - We're off to the races!

In today's class, we focused on building a Lego car as well as how we could power our car using the air pressure from a balloon.  You can see an example here:

Lego Balloon Car Demo

The kids had a blast building and testing the balloon car! 

Lego Class #6 - Mosaics

LEGO and Art

During this class, we explored creating artwork with Lego bricks in the form of mosaics.  One piece of artwork that we looked at is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh.  This Lego fan created Starry Night completely from Lego bricks!

http://brillig.com/lego/starry_night/
We also watched the video showing another artist who makes his living designing with Lego bricks.

http://www.homeschoolshare.com/lego_artist.php

Afterwards, we tried creating our initials with Legos using the mosaic technique. 

Lego Class #5

This set of pictures is from the 5th Lego Class (October 23rd).