Building Better Learning with LEGO and Purposeful Play

LEGO and Education… What is not to love? Here are just a few reasons why LEGO Serious Play is such a potentially transformational tool for learning.

1. ENHANCED COMMUNICATION | TELLING COMPELLING STORIES

In LEGO Serious Play, learners use bricks to communicate their thinking – like a 3D printer for their thoughts. They then share their thinking in the form of ‘model stories’. In doing so, they can engage their peers using visual, auditory and kinaesthetic modes of communication, supercharging the active engagement levels of a group in the process.

2. PRINCIPLES OF PLAY | MAKING LEARNING A JOYFUL EXPERIENCE

LEGO Serious Play is an example of guided play. Learners have agency within a carefully constructed learning framework, with the rules and constraints intentionally designed by facilitators. This learner-agency is empowering, giving them greater autonomy over the choices they make. LEGO Serious Play also leverages on gamificationtechniques to motivate students who are set challenges – much like quests in a computer game – with Build Levels that need to be completed before moving on to the next stage.

3. ENGAGEMENT | ‘HANDS-ON’ EXPERIENCE FOSTERING A STATE OF FLOW

LEGO the toy taps into our innate desire to build and shape the world in which we live. Through the bricks, we are not given toys, rather the elements and system to construct our toys for ourselves. This freedom to create using an intuitive modular system is a significant factor underpinning LEGO’s success and is a key reason why LEGO Serious Play is such a potentially powerful tool for learning. Learners quickly find themselves ‘in the zone’ as they enter a flow state. In this ‘zone’, they become ‘fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity’.

To be ‘in flow’, an individual needs to be both highly skilled, whilst being appropriately challenged. The intuitive nature of building with LEGO bricks means that anyone can quickly become highly skilled in using the bricks to build; even for LEGO ‘newbies’, a 30 minute introduction to the process should provide even the most hands-off people with the skills they require to build suitably complex models. In LEGO Serious Play, the level of challenge is determined by the teacher-facilitator. As with any learning experience, crafting relevant and engaging questions that will appropriately stretch learners is essential to ensuring that they remain ‘hooked’ and so, motivated to learn.

4. MEANINGFUL LEARNING | RELATABLE TO THEIR REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE

In LEGO Serious Play, learners go through build cycles, constructing new knowledge based on what they already know, inviting their peers to share their thinking on a given topic and then using these socialised ideas to challenge their own levels of understanding. It is this construction and reconstruction of new understandings and knowledge atop of prior knowledge – through experience and ongoing learning – that makes LEGO Serious Play such a potent educational tool.

5. MAKING THINKING VISIBLE | MAKING TACIT KNOWLEDGE EXPLICIT

Because it is difficult to articulate, tacit knowledge presents us with a unique challenge in the context of education. How can others benefit from what we have learned from our formative life experiences if this learning is not readily accessible? LEGO Serious Play  offers learners a mechanism for communicating tacit knowledge in an explicit way. Model building provides a cognitive space to express these tacit abstractions through metaphor without the constraints of first having to use verbal or written communication. Once made explicit, others can access this formerly difficult to access knowledge

Want to Learn more about using LEGO Serious Play for Education?

The following resources and pathways might prove useful:

• Building Better Learning: Using the LEGO Serious Play Method in Education – I wrote this book to document my classroom experiences and key takeaways
• SERIOUSWORK’s LEGO Serious Play Education Training: Inspired by the book, this training is designed for educators and learning designers who want to use LEGO Serious Play to build better learning experiences within their context and setting