Give a youngster a Lego set and he loves it.
Give them a huge bin of Lego pieces gathered from many sets, all sorted by color and type, and…
They don’t know what to do with it.
Give them a huge bin of Lego pieces gathered from many sets, all sorted by color and type, and…
They don’t know what to do with it.
If by "Lego set" you mean a pre-determined object that is decomposed into LEGO style blocks, and must be assembled in only one form, in order to match the photo on the box, that is some kind of modern perversion of the Spirit of LEGO.
When I was a small child, we had several kinds of kits. My neighbor had the ultimate nerd's Erector Set type building materials.
I had a set for very small children, called "Bristle Blocks". These were various plastic shapes that locked together with plastic bristles on the end. They also included rolling wheels. They were very versatile, and we could build all kinds of things, my sister and I. We had a big pile of randomly-shaped Bristle Blocks that we stored in a duffel bag.
We also had, courtesy of my grandmother, a very old set of non-LEGO. It was a house model, that was composed of the same type of blocks, and they all had specific uses and placements. It was fun to build, tear down, and rebuild, and yeah, they could be composed into different shapes if you really wanted, but the goal was to reproduce the house.
We also had Lincoln Logs. These were 100% wood, and they notched together like a real-life log cabin would. And they also included green-colored slats for the roof. There were no pre-made patterns, and so you could just build the logs in whatever shapes, but they were obviously designed for houses, and cabins, and other building-shaped things.
These were all really fun, and exercised our creativity. I have no idea why a child would "not know what to do" with a huge bin of random LEGO pieces. I believe that the vast majority of kids would find a way to make them work together. LEGOs were built because of their interchangeability.
By the same token, we also had a lot of Star Wars official merch. And some of those vehicles had many fiddly parts that you could take apart, and put back together. And admittedly, I treated some like LEGO, and I would unscrew all their panels and disassemble them completely, to see how they worked.
I was not as adept at reassembling them, and so my father tended to get pissed when I ruined a very expensive Star Wars vehicle through my curiosity. But at least it wasn't one of his radio sets.