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Comment by kissgyorgy | Hacker News Reader

One of the best aspects of LEGO is teaching kids creativity. In my childhood, I never had a helicopter set or anything fancy, I only had bricks and LEGO people, but I built whole cities, helicopters, beaches with palm trees, trucks, airplanes. I only needed a picture, but most of the time not even that.

I have been called "very creative person" multiple times over my life, and I'm pretty sure part of the reason is playing hundreds of hours with LEGO this way.

The modern implementation of LEGO is Minecraft, so you should allow your child to play it.

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My brother, sister and I inherited a lot of Lego from older cousins. No real sets, just masses of pieces. We built an entire city, rudimentary economy rules, I wrote my first computer program to balance the cheque book stubs that we wrote each other... we must have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on that verandah

Lego Minecraft is actually quite good: "classic" two-by-four and two-by-two bricks (modern Lego is mostly one stud wide, because you can have more detail without making the models very large), no stickers (everything is pad printed), and sensible colors. And a reasonable amount of not-tiny bricks (in Lego world, in absolute terms it's still an expensive toy).

Many people don't like the Minecraft mini figures, but you can just throw them in some bin and ignore them.

The transition of LEGO to more of a model building thing has been interesting, as has the increase in level of obsession places like HN have for LEGO. I feel that this is field ripe for disruption; for someone to build model kits that are as accessible and approachable as LEGO, but drop the pretence of being general bricks.

IKEA for fun? :)

As a creative playground my oldest has got into Lego Worlds much easier than Minecraft but it's also far more limiting, looking forward to carrying that over and teaching them the possibilities around redstone

Whats the best age to introduce lego to kids?

We started giving Lego sets for our kids 1st birthdays ;). The eldest - 8yo - is now building anything on any scale in no time. Just made 7 MOCs for colleagues this Christmas with him designing and me clicking in BrickLink studio. So much fun :)

I started with sets when I was 2, over 40 years ago. I think it’s more a question of instilling the motivation to build and be curious.

For me, it was inability to afford any other toys, so LEGO became my dream medium.

For others, that might be an exciting challenge posed. For example, during COVID we have been doing weekly “LEGO Masters” challenges with my niece and nephews over Zoom, where we pick a theme and then present to each other a week later. They are 5, 5, and 8, and then my partner’s brother, cousin, and I routinely join in. It’s not as much a competition as it is a creativity prompt, an encouragement of presentation and sharing (and thinking about your share of the presentation time), and a way to get to know each other better while distant.

Incidentally, I got into Rebrickable a few months ago after starting to (finally) organize my collection during lockdown and these challenges. I spent a couple hours checking off nearly all of the sets that I know that I own, and when I was done, the site told me the value was about $25,000. I’m kind of shocked.

My son is 2 1/2 and loves to do jigsaw puzzles but with lego, he seems not very interested yet. Maybe 3d reasoning develops a bit later.. But for around that age or a bit older like 3-4, what sets work best? Simple block sets? Sets that include small lego people? Thank you. I grew up behind the iron curtain and lego wasn’t available until I was a bit older and we were playing with other things

Maybe sets that relate to real-world interests? I remember fire/police vehicles and race cars being a hit.

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