This is what we missed in the pink aisle

They learned. So. Much. They accomplished something really interesting, and fairly difficult (I know because I’ve helped out with a number of those things myself). They played aliens with their twelve year old sibling, and built things with them, and they so very, very rarely play together anymore.

See also Pink Bricks are not new in LEGO

Kel Bachus

An engineer friend of mine recently extolled to me the virtues of Legos for teaching math and engineering concepts to children.

As he talked, I thought back to my experiences with Legos, which had been somewhat limited and mostly involved building square house shapes and furnishing them with benches and tables.  I realized that even as a girl raised in a fairly feminist, evolved family, my first real experience with a schematic really didn’t come until I was a teenager when for a while I built and painted model airplanes.

My daughter, who’s seven, has lots of Legos.  They’re in enormous bins that live under beds or in closets, and mostly get dumped out in a sea of pointy plastic.  They stay on the floor like a huge spreading oil spill with as much collateral damage, like when I inevitably step on one in an entirely different room of the…

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