O Lego It was mine toy favorite as a child. My best friend and I spent countless hours crouching over a giant pile of bricks, using our own language – hundreds of names for hundreds of different pieces – to communicate which one we needed and what we were building. Now that I’m a father, I’m doing the same with my own children, and that means so much more.
The toy has been around for generations. The Lego Group, the company behind the plastic objects, celebrated its 90th anniversary on Saturday with Lego Con, a virtual convention streamed live on YouTube from Lego House in Billund, Denmark – a 12,077 square meter complex shaped like Lego bricks and filled with 25 million of them.
They have a lot to celebrate. Lego – a stylized term for “leg godt”, which means to play well in Danish and has a happy coincidence that it also means to gather or collect in Latin – has been named the greatest toy of all time by industry professionals and cited as the most influential toy of all time by historians and experts.
The Lego Group is the largest toy company in the world. Often seen as a toy for boys, its success shows its popularity with girls and adults alike. While Lego has made parents live in perpetual fear of stepping on a forgotten brick, it’s still the perfect toy.
The last major patent for Lego building blocks expired in 1978, but more than 40 years later, virtually no other competitor has come close. This is because, in addition to brand recognition and aggressive competitiveness, the quality and inventiveness of its product is unparalleled.
Lego bricks are virtually indestructible, withstanding repetitive or rough play and lasting for decades. My childhood bricks from the 1980s, if I kept them, would be in the same condition as the ones I buy for my son now, making it a toy that parents can leave for their kids.
Not only that, but each brick made since 1958 fits into every other, allowing the collections to grow indefinitely. Even Lego Duplo, the larger brick system my son plays with, fits perfectly with his brother’s.
This quality comes at a price. A Lego is notoriously expensive – by one study, the average set costs $130 in the US. United States $111 in Hong Kong, where it’s cheapest, and $672 in Ecuador, where it’s the most — but parents, myself included, are usually willing to pay.
Further lessening the impact of the expense is the fact that the company’s charity arm, the Lego Foundation, is a Unicef which supports early childhood education and teacher training programs in places like Rwanda, Zambia, South Africa, Serbia and Iraq. It is also the largest private sector contributor to the response to Covid-19 from Unicef.
A Lego is also a generally safe purchase in terms of content, with a long-standing policy of “not creating sets that feature actual military vehicles that are currently in use”.
A 2016 study found that Lego products have become increasingly violent over time, with nearly 30% of modern sets containing at least one weapon, but these are actually quite benign, like light sabers. Star Wars and medieval ray guns and swords. There is no Lego AR-15.
This secure brand integrity extends to licensed Lego content. 2014’s “The Lego Movie” and 2017’s “The Lego Batman Movie” are, for all their irreverence, great fun for all ages and arguably the best toy-based movies ever made, not that be a high level.
And it turns out that all the sales pitches we gave our parents about its educational benefits were true. Lego was touted as being able to help children and teenagers develop social and communication skills, motor skills, spatial ability, problem solving and creativity.
It has been found that playing with a Lego helps children with autism to improve social interaction, possibly more than other therapy methods, and it also benefits the health and rehabilitation outcomes of hospitalized children, as well as enabling children with cerebral palsy to demonstrate understanding and cognitive skills.
Lego bricks are used in cognitive rehabilitation therapies for the elderly and are being studied as a way to help elderly and visually impaired people with household chores.
Lego is also used to model biochemical pathways, create simulations of the nervous system, build devices to study cell and tissue physiology and environments to study plants and organisms, calibrate ultrasound machines, test cell phone camera lenses, and test methods of spatial organization. .
It is used to teach physics, chemistry, biology, mechatronics, programming, robotics and engineering in elementary schools through faculties and to assess the core competencies of resident urologists. It is even used to teach academic writing.
The toy is also credited with inspiring a number of inventions, including a fiber probe to detect infectious agents, microneedle robots for intestinal drug delivery, strategy for drug design, synthesis and discovery, hydrogels with a variety of medical and commercial uses. and a forensic method for analyzing traces of explosives.
In addition to these hard science fields, artists are using Lego to create sculptures and paintings displayed in galleries and museums. It’s impressive for a company that was recently on the brink of bankruptcy.
The Lego Group was founded in 1932, though only named Lego in 1936, by Ole Kirk Kristiansen, a carpenter turned toy maker from Billund. It has since been owned by the family, now led by their grandson, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Ole’s son Godtfred created the ingenious interlock design in 1958, which has not changed since.
Although the patent expired in 1978, ironically that was when Lego’s global popularity soared. The key was adding themes, which gave the playsets context. That year, they introduced Lego Town, Lego Castle, and Lego Space, as well as Lego minifigures. Lego Pirates joined the group in 1989.
But success gave rise to competitors and imitations, and the following years saw declining sales and poor strategic choices. In 2003, the company was operating with a net loss and debt of $800 million.
The turnaround began in 1999, but it would take years to confirm. They started making sets based on licensed properties, mostly from Star Wars.
The two really fit together. Star Wars’ endless array of spaceships, vehicles, environments, and creatures was pretty much ready for Lego, and it continues to be one of its best-selling themes.
The Star Wars Millennium Falcon is also among the most expensive Lego sets (by retail price, not collectible value), costing $800. The largest Lego model ever built is the full-size Star Wars X-Wing, made of 5,335,200 pieces. The biggest set sold is the Art World Map, consisting of 11,695 pieces.
Lego is truly the best toy ever invented. But it’s more than just a toy. Your infinite possibilities give you infinite purpose. It is a means of creation and expression.
And it’s a great way to share my childhood with my kids and for them to share theirs with me.
Source: CNN Brasil
