The Learning Power of Lego [Infographic]

Ole Kirk Christiansen created Legos in the 1940s in Denmark. Ole’s company originally sold and made wooden stepladders and ironing boards, until he started making wooden toys. The toys were more popular, so he decided to sell toys exclusively. He named the company LEGO, which came from the Danish phrase “play well“.

Lego bricks have withstood the test of time because of their unlimited open-ended possibilities - 400 billion bricks have been produced since 1958. Lego has been going strong for the last sixty years, developing children’s creativity, fine motor skills, teamwork, and curiosity. Who knows what the next fifty years will bring!

Check out this infographic to learn some history of LEGO and how it’s being used in the education field.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via: onlinecollege

Lego Man in Space

Two Canadian high school students have successfully launched a Lego man almost 80,000 feet above sea level high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.

The two teens, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed, were inspired to do the project about a year and a half ago when Ho saw a YouTube video of MIT students who sent a balloon to near space. Ho wanted to see if he could do it too.


Via: LA Times

Lego Model of The Large Hadron Collider

A physicist from the University of Copenhagen has spent over 80 hours of work and over $2,600 to built a Large Hadron Collider model out of 9,500 LEGOs. The Lego LHC is a 1:50 scale model of the real thing, making the minifig scientists close to scale with real people.

As we write, scientists are trying to find out whether the elusive Higgs boson particle was glimpsed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, fueling huge excitement. If the particle, also known as the God particle, was actually there,
it will make physics history.

The LHC scientists do not yet have enough data to claim a discovery. But in the meantime, at home in Copenhagen, one physicist Sascha Mehlhase from the Niels Bohr Institute has made a part of the collider, the Atlas detector, out of LEGO toy bricks.