Read on to learn more about her store, We Game to Please and discover how LEGO can benefit children.
My son loves all things LEGO. One year, I bought him a Mindstorms set for Christmas instead of the usual LEGO or Technic set. I was so impressed with how much you can do with it. That got me to jump onto getting a teaching certificate in programming, and I started teaching Robotics afterschool. In 2007, while I was searching for LEGO pieces for my classes, I discovered BrickLink. It was a miracle!
In the beginning, it was all trial and error; there were no lesson plans made for teaching Robotics. So for each class, I tried to design three to four levels of building ability and prepared suitable material for each level. I bought almost every set made by LEGO that dealt with simple machines or scientific movement. Some of them worked whereas some did not. Once I found something I could use, I would buy six sets of those pieces to use in various classes.
Five years into teaching Robotics, I migrated to the newer version of the Mindstorms family with the NXT. With that, 90% of the pieces I had were no longer needed. So I decided to open a store on BrickLink to sell all of the extra pieces and use the money to buy more pieces for the NXT classes.
I sell what I know. I know robotics and mainly sell those types of pieces. I can answer questions for buyers since I know how the pieces work together. We sell to other LEGO and afterschool franchises, as well as First LEGO League teams, which are the bulk of my repeat big orders. My two cents to new stores is to find something you like and specialize in it.
Being able to learn so much from what the students perceive as playing. For example, one of the first things we build in the beginner classes is a Door Alarm. It’s a very simple robot with only 11 pieces but it teaches students how the robot sees. All new groups get to build a Door Alarm and then we talk about field of vision, how humans see and how the robot sees. Then, I have the students run and jump over the robot’s field of vision. If the robot sees them, they are out and sit down. We keep doing this until we have a winner, the last student still standing.
When I run into past students, many of them tell me how the robotics classes have come back to help them in the classes they are taking now in college or in high school. One told me, “Physics is so easy for me because I remember the Door Alarm or how some other robot we built worked. Now I realize we were actually learning when I thought we were playing.”
The benefits of LEGO are really remarkable—from eye-hand coordination and pattern recognition with DUPLO to three-dimensional thinking, organizing and planning with LEGO bricks, and critical thinking of robotics. The only negative I know is stepping on one!
To me, LEGO is the best toy. Period.
As my son Jamie was growing up, we had converted our dining room into our “Creative Room.” The room was full of LEGO. His personal favorite was Bionicle. When he was in 9th grade, one of his projects was to build a house. The rest of his classmates made houses out of popsicle sticks or cardboard, but Jamie made a two-story LEGO house that opened up and had lights. None of his classmates believed that he had made it without instructions.
In my opinion, the best set with the most learning opportunities is the old 1032 set. It is a simple machines set. Most of the designs are used again in newer sets but never with as many opportunities as with this set. There are 20 step-by-step instruction booklets, but each one of them has a photo on the back with a harder challenge that does not come with instructions (to push you to the challenge). Each set of the directions is so diverse that you can make and learn so much from them.