Work hard, play hard – what has LEGO™ to do with science?

Getting your hands on one of the coveted LEGO™ catalogues, full of marvels and usually conveniently found in toy shops, was always considered a lucky day in my house. Discussions about new models with friends and family and overturning our LEGO™ collections to build something even remotely similar invariably ensued. My prime objective was having fun, so only in hindsight is it that I learned about all the positive effects playing with the colourful building blocks was supposed to have: improving spatial sense, honing fine motor skills and encouraging creativity. Now that I’m working in a lab full time, incidentally these are all skills I am using every day, from figuring out how a molecule might bind to a receptor to pipetting a truly minuscule amount of reagent. After facing repeated criticism for targeting their marketing campaigns increasingly towards boys, with their ranges targeted at girls often portraying harmful gender stereotypes, LEGO™ even introduced a mini-figure range of female scientists.

But LEGO™ is not only a thing to be enjoyed when you’re a child – researchers all over the world are using the brick-based toy for their own purposes. A group of researchers in Canada uses a lego-built model to teach first year medical students how to interview a patient most effectively. And – maybe not surprisingly – it turns out that building space-filling protein models out of LEGO™ is not only a more reliable way to teach protein synthesis but also might be a quick way to generate 3D geometric models of various compounds you want to visualise.

This weekend the Centre for Life, the beloved science museum of Newcastle, reopens its doors with its new exhibition North East LEGO™ Landmarks. Why don’t you check it out for yourself? I’m sure I will.

https://pixabay.com/en/lego-doll-the-per-amphitheatre-1044891/

Papers:

Using LEGO™ to teach med students how to talk to patients: Harding, Sheila Rutledge, and Marcel F. D'Eon. "Using a LegoTM-Based Communications Simulation to Introduce Medical Students to Patient-Centered Interviewing." Teaching and learning in medicine 13, no. 2 (2001): 130-135.

Teaching Protein Synthesis using LEGO™: Templin, Mark A., and Marcia K. Fetters. "A working model of protein synthesis using LegoTM building blocks." The American Biology Teacher 64, no. 9 (2002): 673-678.

Using LEGO™ as inspiration for a 3D modelling system: Eng, Markus, Ken Camarata, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, and Mark D. Gross. "Flexm: Designing a physical construction kit for 3d modeling." International Journal of Architectural Computing 4, no. 2 (2006): 27-47.