While returning home from a stroll through a glorious deciduous wood resplendent with Autumn colour, the Badger saw an interesting book in a charity shop window. He popped in and came out with a carrier bag half-full of Lego bricks of all shapes, sizes, colours, and types rather than the book! The Lego was in great condition at a bargain price and buying it for his grandson to play with when he visits seemed a no-brainer. On arriving home, the bag was emptied onto a table. There were standard bricks and bases, Technik bricks, wheels, motors, and arms, legs, torsos, heads, and hands from Lego figures, and much more. The Badger was hooked. He spent the rest of the afternoon using his imagination to produce a number of creative masterpieces! Indeed, everyday since, the Badger’s improved his masterpieces and created new ones. It’s addictive!
Lego empowers creativity, provides immediate gratification from having built something with your hands, and it helps to develop spatial reasoning, design thinking, and problem-solving. Furthermore, it encourages an understanding of mechanics through trial and error. It’s fun, educational, and great for kids (and adults) of all ages with building things often a collaborative and social activity. Kids, for example, learn from each other when they play with it together and when adults help them. Building Lego models together strengthens the bonds between individuals.
As the Badger built his own masterpieces, he remembered that Lego has been an excellent teaching aid at home and in education establishments for decades, as the recent announcement about a teenager building a robotic hand using Lego illustrates. It also struck him that Millennials were shaped by the emergence of the internet, Gen Z were moulded by social media’s evolution, and that Gen Alpha – his grandson’s generation – will be defined by the rapid expansion of AI use. The Badger senses a danger, however, that Gen Alpha may simply ask AI for ideas and instructions of what to build from a bag of bricks rather than use their own imagination and individuality to create masterpieces. Always inquisitive, the Badger asked CoPilot what could be built with a bag of mixed Lego bricks. It replied with ideas and instructions, and thus neatly illustrated that the danger of Gen Alpha outsourcing their imagination, creativity, and physical trial and error learning to AI is real.
A recent UK study found that ~22% of 8 to 12 year-old children already use generative AI tools, which – let’s remember – have not been designed from the outset with children in mind. Have the lessons from social media’s impact on children been learned? The answer’s not obvious, which is why the Badger will be encouraging his grandson to produce his own Lego masterpieces without engaging in virtual world interactions. Another reason, of course, is that the Badger will be able to transfer knowledge and enjoy helping to build his creations too…
The Information Badger 