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Attendees:
David Kohrman
Larry Pieniazek
Nik Pieniazek
Jason Spears
Overall Picture Directories:
Larry Pieniazek
Report by Jason Spears
Saturday March 20th, 2004.
We had two workshops, the first was targeted for five to eight year-olds and the second was for eight plus. While our target was for eight plus in the second session, quite a few kids were younger. David was at the museum at nine-thirty (our planned meeting time), but Larry, Nik & I were a little late as we had been finishing putting instructions in sheet protectors. We had decided that for the first session the kids would put together some of Larry’s lawn tractors and utility trailers. For the second session, I had designed a small house that could be built in three sections (front, back, and roof). I managed to build five copies out of my collection and Larry built another five, albeit in a different color scheme.
By ten a.m. we had the projector running and hooked up to Larry’s laptop for the presentation. A few more kids (with their parents) trickled in for about five minutes as we got the rest of our examples ready. David had brought along some very nice town buildings, Nik had an impressive collection of Sea Monkey creations, while I brought along two medieval houses.
Larry volunteered to run through the presentation, while Nik, David and I helped show examples of points being made in the presentation. We discussed why overlapping was a good idea in their models and how to use color to bring a model to life. Also we showed the kids how many pieces could be used outside their normal theme. Star Wars pieces in Castle creations, Castle bits in Town models, etc. We briefly touched on SNOT techniques and how they shouldn’t be limited to normal piece orientation.
After the slide show and presentation, we passed out instructions and pieces for the kids to see how some of those techniques we talked about could be applied to actual creations. The tractors were a big hit, although many kids were bummed that they didn’t have a complete tractor/trailer set. Perhaps teaching the kids about sharing was an important lesson too. (Building with other LEGO fans is an interesting experience, more so when you are building out of someone else’s collection.)
The structured build was followed by some free build time where the kids got a selection of pieces that LEGO provided via an event kit. Many interesting models were created during the free build. It was a pleasant reminder that kids can be some of the most innovative builders and all the MichLUG members learned a thing or two.
When it was all said and done, I believe the kids had a great time, the museum was more than happy with the workshops and we had a pretty good time too. We learned some important lessons and if we chose to do more workshops in the future we will be have some good ideas on how to make it even better.
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Workshop Pictures:
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