4 ms·

Why not buy more Legos rather than remove them?

andrewflnr 5y ago
It wouldn't help, just change the number of pieces involved in the conflicts. Speaking from experience, you can never have so many Legos that you don't want more.
- aksss 5y ago
  Even if there's no one else in the room.
- Breazy 5y ago
  When I was a kid my mother bought me and my two brothers a 5 gallon bucket of lego at a yardsale. We played with those bricks A LOT but no matter how much we built the bucket never seemed to drop below half full. There are only so many bricks you can place a day before your fingers feel like they're going to bleed. Of course, we weren't keeping builds around forever either. That's the real trick I think. Lego should be for ephemeral builds (for some reason, kids usually understand this better than adults.) At the end of the day/week/month, take whatever you built and drop it back into the bucket. If you have enough lego for X kids to build things that last Y days, you'll never run out.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    I don't know, my sister and I kept a lot of things around for a long time, in a similar way to the Legotown in the article. But I'd agree that probably doesn't work if you have a bunch of kids trying to play with the same set. It has to be very clear that everyone is borrowing the Legos, and anything that survives the day's session needs some consent from everyone.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    one of my best friends growing up was from one of those kinds of families that thought Harry Potter was witchcraft, but he had a cool older brother who later showed me QBASIC and RPG Maker 95 and got me into programming. when I'd spend the night at this friend's house, we would play with legos but in a different way than most kids do, which my friend learned from his big brother: instead of building walls and roofs and such for houses in Legotown, all walls and everything were just one brick high, unless necessary for some specific purpose. when you play like this, your Legotown becomes a cross between a 16-bit JRPG and a tabletop role-playing game—you can focus on role-playing and adventures using spaceships and stuff that you build, while having a town that resembles blueprints or cut-away diagrams, which makes it easy for players to go visit each others houses, and for a "dungeon master" type player to move the story along, introduce villains, role-play NPCs in the town, and so forth. I brought this type of play home to my four younger siblings and we had a Lego Island with an ongoing story that evolved every time we played. it was fun to have the persistence of houses that made up a town on an island, but building walls only one brick high and using our imaginations to fill in the rest to save on bricks so we could build airplanes and spaceships and whatever we wanted for a given play session. years later I would put two and two together and realize that my friend's older brother more than likely had some secret D&D books that his mom would forbid him from having and this game was his way of role-playing with his younger brother. anyway, if you have kids, this is a solid way to introduce basic role-playing and epic storylines with the persistence of a video game, but without actually being a video game—highly recommended.
    - andrewflnr 5y ago
      Nice, we did the one-brick-high walls thing, too, and minifigures representing ourselves. My sister wasn't much into the epic storylines, though. :D
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  Or, better yet, use it as a teachable moment. They are teachers. Teach. Instead of doing that, they removed the problem instead of facing it. Instead of explaining it to children who lacked the tools to deal with the issue, or the language to express their thoughts completely, they used their lack of language to trap them... from the article: >>Carl: “We didn’t ‘give’ the pieces, we found and shared them.” Lukas: “It’s like giving to charity.” Carl: “I don’t agree with using words like ‘gave.’ Because when someone wants to move in, we find them a platform and bricks and we build them a house and find them windows and a door.” These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children’s contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.<< This is twisting language to trap, like a debate. Something a child is not prepared for. They have neither the understanding of the power structure nor the conversation they've enganged in. They've been punished for crimes they don't fully comprehend and lost the chance to learn engineering, team play and concession, while the teachers have missed out on a very teachable moment because, "We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded" - but, in truth, it was an exercise in laziness.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    Did you read to the end of the article, where they brought the Legos back?
    - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      I did, but by that point, is the damage not done? The children have seen their words twisted and the Legos taken away, only to be brought back after blame has been laid. These people talk about singling out done by children when in this very same article they have singled out two children making "assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive". That is a lot to lay at the feet of children over the misappropriation of Legos. Do you not think this all could have been headed off before the banning of Legos with the same discussion tactics that happened post ban, post tantrum and pre-blog railing against the woes of a capitalist society as seen through the perversions of a small child?
Sharlin 5y ago
Why not print more money to fix wealth inequality?
- adamrezich 5y ago
  imagine living in this mindset constantly and being unable to turn it off, even when talking about kids playing with legos
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    You mean it’s not relevant to mention economics in a discussion about children who invented an economy?
    - adamrezich 5y ago
      not everything has to be an analogy to your geopolitical worldview especially with regards to children playing with legos "mom can I have some more spaghetti?" "oh sure, let me just call up the Federal Spaghetti Reserve and ask it to print up some more Spaghetti Dollars, thus only further increasing this nation's Spaghetti Inflation far past manageable limits—great idea, if you want to usher in complete economic collapse!!" like come on
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Because Lego isn’t valued on scarcity.
  - Inityx 5y ago
    What would be the real-life equivalent of buying more LEGO then?
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      Lego is the end product. Not something you use to claim scare resources. So it would be like printing more oil or housing. Once you reach that point you are in a post scarcity society. In this situation, the issue is that there aren’t enough nice pieces for everyone. At some point there become enough that without being insanely greedy that everyone can have some.

It wouldn't help, just change the number of pieces involved in the conflicts. Speaking from experience, you can never have so many Legos that you don't want more.

aksss 5y ago
Even if there's no one else in the room.
Breazy 5y ago
When I was a kid my mother bought me and my two brothers a 5 gallon bucket of lego at a yardsale. We played with those bricks A LOT but no matter how much we built the bucket never seemed to drop below half full. There are only so many bricks you can place a day before your fingers feel like they're going to bleed. Of course, we weren't keeping builds around forever either. That's the real trick I think. Lego should be for ephemeral builds (for some reason, kids usually understand this better than adults.) At the end of the day/week/month, take whatever you built and drop it back into the bucket. If you have enough lego for X kids to build things that last Y days, you'll never run out.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  I don't know, my sister and I kept a lot of things around for a long time, in a similar way to the Legotown in the article. But I'd agree that probably doesn't work if you have a bunch of kids trying to play with the same set. It has to be very clear that everyone is borrowing the Legos, and anything that survives the day's session needs some consent from everyone.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  one of my best friends growing up was from one of those kinds of families that thought Harry Potter was witchcraft, but he had a cool older brother who later showed me QBASIC and RPG Maker 95 and got me into programming. when I'd spend the night at this friend's house, we would play with legos but in a different way than most kids do, which my friend learned from his big brother: instead of building walls and roofs and such for houses in Legotown, all walls and everything were just one brick high, unless necessary for some specific purpose. when you play like this, your Legotown becomes a cross between a 16-bit JRPG and a tabletop role-playing game—you can focus on role-playing and adventures using spaceships and stuff that you build, while having a town that resembles blueprints or cut-away diagrams, which makes it easy for players to go visit each others houses, and for a "dungeon master" type player to move the story along, introduce villains, role-play NPCs in the town, and so forth. I brought this type of play home to my four younger siblings and we had a Lego Island with an ongoing story that evolved every time we played. it was fun to have the persistence of houses that made up a town on an island, but building walls only one brick high and using our imaginations to fill in the rest to save on bricks so we could build airplanes and spaceships and whatever we wanted for a given play session. years later I would put two and two together and realize that my friend's older brother more than likely had some secret D&D books that his mom would forbid him from having and this game was his way of role-playing with his younger brother. anyway, if you have kids, this is a solid way to introduce basic role-playing and epic storylines with the persistence of a video game, but without actually being a video game—highly recommended.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    Nice, we did the one-brick-high walls thing, too, and minifigures representing ourselves. My sister wasn't much into the epic storylines, though. :D
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
Or, better yet, use it as a teachable moment. They are teachers. Teach. Instead of doing that, they removed the problem instead of facing it. Instead of explaining it to children who lacked the tools to deal with the issue, or the language to express their thoughts completely, they used their lack of language to trap them... from the article: >>Carl: “We didn’t ‘give’ the pieces, we found and shared them.” Lukas: “It’s like giving to charity.” Carl: “I don’t agree with using words like ‘gave.’ Because when someone wants to move in, we find them a platform and bricks and we build them a house and find them windows and a door.” These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that “giving” holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children’s contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.<< This is twisting language to trap, like a debate. Something a child is not prepared for. They have neither the understanding of the power structure nor the conversation they've enganged in. They've been punished for crimes they don't fully comprehend and lost the chance to learn engineering, team play and concession, while the teachers have missed out on a very teachable moment because, "We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded" - but, in truth, it was an exercise in laziness.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Did you read to the end of the article, where they brought the Legos back?
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    I did, but by that point, is the damage not done? The children have seen their words twisted and the Legos taken away, only to be brought back after blame has been laid. These people talk about singling out done by children when in this very same article they have singled out two children making "assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive". That is a lot to lay at the feet of children over the misappropriation of Legos. Do you not think this all could have been headed off before the banning of Legos with the same discussion tactics that happened post ban, post tantrum and pre-blog railing against the woes of a capitalist society as seen through the perversions of a small child?

Sharlin 5y ago

Why not print more money to fix wealth inequality?

adamrezich 5y ago
imagine living in this mindset constantly and being unable to turn it off, even when talking about kids playing with legos
- Sharlin 5y ago
  You mean it’s not relevant to mention economics in a discussion about children who invented an economy?
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    not everything has to be an analogy to your geopolitical worldview especially with regards to children playing with legos "mom can I have some more spaghetti?" "oh sure, let me just call up the Federal Spaghetti Reserve and ask it to print up some more Spaghetti Dollars, thus only further increasing this nation's Spaghetti Inflation far past manageable limits—great idea, if you want to usher in complete economic collapse!!" like come on
Gigachad 5y ago
Because Lego isn’t valued on scarcity.
- Inityx 5y ago
  What would be the real-life equivalent of buying more LEGO then?
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    Lego is the end product. Not something you use to claim scare resources. So it would be like printing more oil or housing. Once you reach that point you are in a post scarcity society. In this situation, the issue is that there aren’t enough nice pieces for everyone. At some point there become enough that without being insanely greedy that everyone can have some.