Using instructions with Lego ‘stif les a child’s creativity’
LEGO’S branded kits such as Star Wars, which come with instructions, hamper children’s creativity, researchers say.
Some parents complain expensive packs of the toy take away the pleasure and ambition involved in creating something from imagination, using basic bricks.
To test Lego’s claims its sets foster creativity, scientists gave children kits with stepby- step instructions while others were left to build what they wanted.
Both groups were later given other creative tasks. Those who had had no instructions with the Lego outperformed the other group in the creativity tests, the study found.
Researchers from Norway’s Buskerud and Vestfold University College found the Lego sets with instructions were too easy to make and did not spark creativity.
Study co - author Marit Gundersen Engeset said: ‘What we find is that a welldefined problem – in our case, following an explicit set of instructions to build something with Lego – can actually hamper creativity in solving future problems.’
She and Page Moreau of Wisconsin University published their findings in the Journal of Market Research, writing that Lego with instructions is like ‘Googling [the answer to] a problem instead of getting it from your memory’.
They added: ‘Managers and policy-makers should become more aware of the way in which things like routine tasks can make an employee ill- suited for creative work and how standardised testing … can hamper imaginative thinking.’
A debate on Lego’s branded kits was triggered last year by British blogger Chris Swan, who said: ‘The problem is sets that only make one thing like a dragon or s omething licensed from a movie.’
The IT expert, previously in the Royal Navy, said: ‘Lego for me was always about creativity, remaking and improving on existing designs.
‘Those things don’t happen with sets designed to build a model of a single thing … Lego taught me the art of creative destruction – the need to break something in order to make something better. Single outcome sets encourage preservation … that makes them less useful, less educational and in my opinion less fun.’
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto has argued that British-designed Meccano, constructed with nuts and bolts, is of greater educational value as it mimics real-life engineering.
He said: ‘There is no comparison. Children should start with Lego, which is basically a toy … its basic units are bricks. We do not build cars and other machines out of bricks.’
Meccano’s makers have said that in its 1930s heyday, developers included instructions with deliberate errors to test children’s problem-solving.
Lego’s Roar Rude Trangbaek denied the sets are less creative, adding: ‘Children still get bricks and they can combine them. The bricks will probably end up in big boxes … like a pool of creativity.’
Themed Lego sets linked to films can be expensive. The Lego Super Heroes Batcave is £111.19, while the Lord of the Rings kit called The Battle of Helm’s Deep is £174.99. The Star Wars Millennium Falcon set was sold for £95.
‘Like Googling
the answer’