Free Play or Structured Sets?

As I kid, every six months I would scarf down the newest Lego magazine until it fell apart, calculating how many weeds I would need to pull in the yard to be able to earn enough pennies to buy a medieval castle set.

You see, my parents would only buy the generic Legos - the bags of a variety of pieces that didn't have instruction manuals - and avoided Lego sets. It was frustrating for me (thus all of the hours reading through Lego magazines), but as I got older, I realized how smart my parents were.

If my mom brought out the bucket of random Legos, we would pour them out on the ground and start creating anything from houses to spaceships to pirate ships to cities. We started with absolutely nothing and created something from the ground up.

When I visited friends homes and played with their fancy sets, I had such fun following the directions and piecing together a magnificent Star Wars ship. It was easy, it seemed better than any of my creations, and it had a guaranteed good result. All wonderful reasons, in my slightly perfectionist mind, to buy sets over a bag of random generic blocks.

I love this quote by Seth Godin:

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Kits are the training ground for factory workers of tomorrow...

They're fun, they have a place, but they're not about making anything.

Making is failing until you figure out what works.

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What sets/kits are you using that are limiting your ability to start from scratch, create without constraints or directions, and even learn how to fail?

Destiny Yarbro

26 March 2016

Saigon, Vietnam

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