Dad’s Porsche: From a box of bricks
“Dad, what are you building?”
“I don’t know . . .”
My son and I would have the above exchange while building with Lego when he was younger. I would enter his room, sit on the floor, grab some pieces from his (then small) collection and start putting them together based upon whatever aesthetic and/or physical constraints I was feeling that day. The end product was usually some silly sort of house, always incorporating the Lego palm tree, and some sort of blue base for “water.”
This was a departure from my own early experience of Lego, which was strictly “by the book.” Of course, that meant I followed the instructions. I always found this satisfying. But that also meant that I didn’t really begin to comprehend how the pieces fit together into the designers’ intent. I saw each step bit-by-bit, but that didn’t tie back into a continuous thread of form and function.
By contrast, my son and I started out just building. Some of his earlier creations were suspect; asymmetric, rainbows of primary colors with little structural integrity. He loved them and saw beauty in them. That was what mattered. I wondered what would happen when he started encountering instruction manuals. Would his creativity be subsumed into the bounds of realism and doing it “the right way?”
As he began to build kits, something remarkable happened: he started to learn. Rather than taking the steps at face value, he began to see solutions in the steps to problems that he had encountered with his own unique builds. This has especially proven true with mechanisms from the more advanced Lego Technic series. Need to make a joint? There are pieces for that. Are panels falling apart? We can add some bracing to hold them up.
Watching this astonishing evolution and improvement of the models that emerge from his spare parts bin reminded me of my own recent experience of repairing a water pump on our refrigerator. Thanks to some quick research online, I realized that I had the basic plumbing skills required to complete the task thanks to its similarity to working with brake lines on a car. When I started out learning how the different systems and subsystems of a car functioned, I never thought that would lead to confidence to repair other appliances, but that is where it has led me. I got there because I began to understand how things work.
As my son graduates more and more into Lego Technic and its intricate plastic mechanisms inspired by real machines, it is only a short hop over to pulling an automotive transmission apart. When we do, he’ll look inside with a flashlight and say “I’ve seen this before . . .”
And I’ll appreciate having a second-set of hands to do those necessary repairs.
