Engineering with Lego: The building blocks of life

Looking back at some old photos from my childhood I found myself reminiscing about that era and the activities and toys which kept me out of mischief … sometimes. My collection of Lego City kits, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, continued throughout adulthood until only recently I had to say please no more. I didn’t know it back then, but when I was enjoying being a child, I was an enthusiastic engineer in the making.

Getting back to my reflections and specifically how important Lego was to me during childhood, I remembered that I took great pleasure in assembling fire engines, tractors, trucks and cars to name but a few, but in addition, carefully looking at the detail; the mechanical parts and generally how things worked. More specifically though, it made it clear to me that essentially the essence of an engineer is to put things together or take them apart.

Stripping everything back, this is an engineer’s fundamental basic role in life and Lego is a brilliant introduction to this pathway. By subtly applying engineering concepts through play, a child can learn structure and design through assembling and building. For example, you soon learn fast how to build the tallest tower that no longer wobbles and topples over, or constructing a bridge that doesn’t collapse in the middle once some weight, i.e. a toy car, is put on it. Once you become a ‘grown up’ then us mechanical design engineers have to use CAD and other software to produce a design and test to see if it works.

Children are the engineers of our future and once the accompanying instruction book is torn up, so to speak, then that’s where creativity steps in and dreams are built.