In my opinion, the most amazing Lego sculptor is Nathan Sawaya. His work proves that Legos can be used to make art www. Lego makes about 22 billion pieces every year. More than million of those are rubber tires for toy vehicles. That makes Lego one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world. The tallest Lego tower on record was built last year in the Czech Republic. From until , cellulose acetate was the polymer used. This is the same substance that was once used in the movie industry for films.
In , Lego changed the plastic their bricks were made from to another polymer, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene ABS for short. In these cases, a polycarbonate plastic is now used instead. The Lego manufacturing process starts with tiny granules of ABS, brought by the lorry-load to factories. This melts the granules, producing a plastic goo which is automatically fed into Lego part molds. After this, any necessary decorations are added , and parts that need to be put together, such as mini figures, are assembled.
In , Lego manufactured an astonishing 60 billion parts. Of these parts, at least million are miniature tyres for Lego vehicles — making Lego the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world!
When it comes to the pain experienced when you tread on a piece of Lego, ABS is to blame. Some of these parents started online petitions demanding Lego commit to gender neutrality. Sales exploded. The new mini-dolls were, as promised, exceptionally detailed for tiny bits of plastic — Batgirl even has back pockets on her tiny black pants.
There were little Gremlin-like critters called Kryptomites that looked like anthropomorphic crystals. Lego is nothing if not self-serious. The Lego designers had found that monsters that were too scary tended to turn off girls, but adorably pesky ones were a hit. Nothing in the design and launch of a new Lego line is left to chance.
And for kids, convergence seems to come naturally; they slide between one world and the other. For us grown-ups, with our less adaptive minds, it can be hard to comprehend. Lego argues that the instructions serve as a way to teach children how the toys work. Remember when the hollow of an old tree was just fun?
And instead of toys that go rat-tat-tat-tat, today the toys that provoke parental consternation tend to be the ones that ping.
Child-development experts began to argue that they made children too passive and might actually hamper learning. Instead, play researchers argued that toys should foster more open-ended creativity and exploration — toys that forced the child to do the work, like Lego. Promoting creativity appealed to parents too; here was a skill that robots will never take over. Whether Lego actually does foster creativity is almost impossible to say.
There is research showing that kids who play regularly with blocks and Legos have higher standardized-test scores and higher math achievement. The authors went so far as to contend that even standard blocks might give kids too much information — arches, after all, suggest their use. They argue for building with uniform planks. Their 4-year-old cousin Nils and his dad, Chad, came by, too.
Soon everyone was building. At Lego I had heard about the way the company had consciously designed sets to capture every age group from the month-old playing with Duplo sets larger, softer versions of the classic bricks to the grown-ups spending a long weekend constructing a 4,piece Star Wars Death Star, and here seemed to be living proof that their strategy worked.
I thought, too, about early ads for Lego — not the Vietnam-era one, but others in which Legos were marketed as the quiet toy, because for the next two hours, as the kids constructed their models, first sorting them by color, then following the directions, they said hardly a word.
But mostly, the children were silent, heads down, fingers in constant motion. I asked if they always started with the directions.
They do.
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