teem one out for Mindstorms . The ramp up - it - yourself Lego robotics stain is gettingdiscontinuedat the final stage of next year , but that does n’t mean it wo n’t forever live on on in our warmness . But it almost did n’t happen . In his book The Lego Story , Jens Andersen write about the toy dog company ’s growth from makingwooden ducksto make water Hollywood movies . peculiarly occupy is his writeup on how the company , spearhead by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen , himself the grandson of Lego father Ole Kirk Kristiansen and the boy of Lego “ System ” designer Godtfred Kirk Christiansen , narrowly avoided giving in to ‘ LXXX fearmongering surrounding the success of hand-held gaming console to dive headfirst into set ramp up to work with computer . While Lego ’s initial robotics experiments , made in quislingism with MIT , were n’t pronounce as Mindstorms , they put the foundation for the line ’s eventual launching in 1998 .
Below is an excerption from Chapter 7 , “ dally . ”
take out from the bookTHE LEGO STORYby Jens Andersen . Copyright © 2021 by Jens Andersen . English translation © 2022 by Caroline Waight . From Mariner Books , an depression of HarperCollins Publishers . Reprinted by permission .
Photo: AlesiaKan (Shutterstock)
More than ever , it was crucial that LEGO stay alert and on its toe . In the early 1980s , the whole industry establish itself confront with a antecedently unknown challenge : handheld gambling consoles , which were suddenly disrupting traditional forms of play and changing more than a few wish tilt in the run - up to Christmas . In Billund , the situation was initially viewed with supreme calmness . When a newspaper require if the LEGO Group would come out with anything electronic the next class , the Head of Public Relations , Peter Ambeck - Madsen , respond , “ We have n’t change our product - development plans because of these annoy electronic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant stings on the plaything grocery . But the volatile growth that has assume place in electronic game is facilitate to keep us vigilant . ”
Kjeld : Personally , I was captivate by the first handheld games , and later also by the big play consoles with joysticks . I would n’t say that as a toy ship’s company we were afraid of the new contention , however , at least not in the beginning . Of course , we talked a mint about how we might integrate something digital into the LEGO experience , and , having inherited my granddad ’s rarity about machines and engineering , I really gave it a lot of thought .
It soon became clear that gaming console could n’t be discount . Danish schoolchildren of the early 1980s spent their shoal recesses put in by wall of synthetic levelheaded effects , staring fixedly at the little gadgets gripped in their hands , while their thumbs pressed buttons at lightning speed , issuing various commands . Donkey Kong , Octopus , and Mario Bros. were just a few of the games that could be played on the console , which were invented and developed in Japan .
Illustration: HarperCollins Publishers
The handheld play devices became an experiential challenge in platter time . Parents and teachers were driven to madness by the beeps and boops , while some toy stores in Denmark initially reject to stock up them at all because some critic situate that they undermined just , sizeable forms of play . The head vendee for Magasin , a major section computer memory in Denmark , called the games “ nothing but blare , ” and , like LEGO ’s management team , believe they ’d be just a flash in the pan . Many Danish childcare centre were also somewhat circumspect about the “ antisocial ” new type of biz , and severl after - school clubs foreclose youngster from fetch the electronic French telephone . The headspring of one such center in Kolding explain in the spring of 1983 :
We ’ve had enough now . There was a huge gold rush in these game just before Christmas , and it was at its worst here before Easter . The games made nipper eerily passive . They play all by themselves with the French telephone , so there ’s never any motivation to socialize with the other fry . If anything , it can conduce to aggression if another fry is blocking a player ’s light .
Today these unassailable reactions have been relegated to the level of quaint historic anecdote . The accuracy is that the wave of beeping handsets , which were promptly followed by play consoles like the Commodore 64 and Nintendo ’s revolutionary Gameboy , were but the herald of a tsunami of digital hardware that was to inundate shaver ’s and teenagers ’ bedrooms across most of the highly-developed world , all the way up to the bit of the millennium . Over the course of the next decade , the agency tyke played , whether by themselves or with others , and especially what they encounter with , undergo a paradigmatic shift key .
At first , LEGO ’s attitude was one of incredulity ; they believed the games to be a passing fad . When Børsen , one of Denmark ’s leading concern paper , published a special feature on the internationally renowned toy troupe in the spring of 1983 , the former and current oversee directors both went on record saying that they did n’t consider electronic play to be a threat to LEGO ’s continued growth . On this issue , father and boy were , evidently , of like mind . Godtfred remarked , “ In the toy dog industry , we ’re among the most successful companies in the human beings , and we ’re in no way shocked by the popularity of these electronic game . ”
Yet the journalist from Børsen sensed a break between the two generation , so he pressed the question , ask the Word whether LEGO would start raise electronic plaything . It was n’t inconceivable , argued the journalist , since LEGO had of late announced that it would be releasing a serial publication of books sport stories from the FABULAND creation , in partnership with Denmark ’s biggest publishing house , and there were also rumors flying around about LEGO picture show . So , would LEGO continue to shift further away from its core business ?
Kjeld refuse this , but added :
Of of course , that does n’t mean we wo n’t use every new technology we may find relevant . But it will be because the new engineering can serve our purposes . We wo n’t introduce a new technology into the production for technology ’s sake . If we use electronics , it will be integrate in a natural way of life , just as we have been using motor and other technology as a natural part of our scope for many years .
Kjeld , the computing machine swot , had already conceive of LEGO finding its own niche in the newfangled engineering science , in the intersection between play and education — in other words , in schools . As early on as 1980–1981 , LEGO ’s designers collaborated with educators and expert from various fields and forms of teaching , and a commercial for DUPLO have the catchword : “ Make take play for piffling custody . ”
The educational face of the toys was further emphasize over the watch over days . LEGO worked on a range of marriage proposal for technologically enhanced building task for instructor , scholar , and young children aged eighteen calendar month and up , for a new product personal credit line called LEGO Education . LEGO Technic 1 launched in 1985 , follow a couple of age afterwards by LEGO DUPLO Mosaic . The company also set up a learning portal vein where teachers could download free educational activities , as well as education and action packs for the two sets .
In 1982 , in LEGO ’s prescribed fiftieth day of remembrance Holy Scripture , Kjeld used the phrase “ learning through play , ” and around the same time he commented to a newspaper : “ Instead of read about technological things in books , the students can build them themselves . We have a lot of faith in that market . ” Not everyone in the troupe leadership was convince , however , when Kjeld tried to excuse that a with child , important future grocery store for LEGO would be not just school and childcare centers , but also gamey Education Department .
Kjeld : I remember clearly one of the executives order , “ No , that wo n’t work . If the kids are using the brick in schooling , they ’ll get really disturbed of LEGO and wo n’t want to play with it when they get home . ”
“ Oh , come on , do n’t be silly ! ” I said .
One evening in later February 1984 , after yet another long day at the spot , sitting in meeting after merging , Kjeld was relax at home in Skovparken with Camilla . The goggle box exercise set was on , and some schoolchildren appeared onscreen , using a computing gadget to make a little tortoise - similar golem do what they asked . The scene changed , and a homo with a gray beard add up on , tell viewer that he ’d made a special scheduling language that was so simple and intuitive that child could easily control it . The man was Seymour Papert , and he described computers as creative instrument in a new kind of teaching , suitable for the digital age , which was just around the corner . “ Education has very little to do with explanation . It has to do with engagement , with falling in love with the material . ”
Kjeld was sell on the patch . Or , the Wall Street Journal write a few years afterwards , it was well align with the ethos of a company that had “ made a luck satisfy tiddler ’s want to tinker . ” For the first time , LEGO was severely look for resolution as to how the simple small brick could rule a post in the estimator geezerhood .
Kjeld : I became deeply fascinated by Seymour Papert ’s idea about children learning by playing with a computer and the programming language he had invented , which he called “ Logo . ” The day after the broadcast , I asked some employees to contact Papert , and before long got his response . Funnily enough , he ’d been recollect of publish to us for a while , because he ’d used LEGO bricks in several of his experiments at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) in Boston . Even then , the Media Lab was an interdisciplinary stronghold of engineering science , encompassing all form of interests and widely varying mode of thought when it came to programing and digitalization . Not long after that , I went to Boston to speak to the Isle of Man .
The man Kjeld met was both a firebrand and a big kid at affectionateness , with a diverse range of skill and talents . Trained as a mathematician , data processor scientist , and educator , he was deeply inspired by the world - noted Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget . Piaget had sought to realise how nestling construct knowledge , conceive that children developed through meeting challenges . Also , at the most fundamental horizontal surface , he think they wanted to further their own development . Papert expanded on Piaget ’s theories , advocating for the idea that when small fry build thing with their hands , they were build noesis at the same sentence . This character of learning was important , claimed Papert , because it deposit more deeply in the child ’s nous than when the teacher simply told him or her how something worked and how it should be understood .
Meeting Papert and learning about his idea regarding schools of the future , where the nature of play would also be the nature of learning , and data processor would be on an equal basis with pencils and account book , was a watershed bit for Kjeld . He was never particularly affectionate of his own time at school , and he saw potential in a schooling where the baby , as Papert said , took ascendance of their own learning and used the materials around them to search the macrocosm and infer themselves in Modern ways .
Kjeld : It was Seymour who introduced me to the estimation of the levelheaded bricks that you could programme yourself , and he gave me the inspiration for how these intelligent brick could be the third big technological origination in LEGO ’s story . Out of the original , innovative building system in 1955 , we had make the rack in 1962 , which meant that the bricks could move . In 1966 came the electric motor , which meant mass could get even more life and play out of their bricks . The next stagecoach Seymour and I image was that people could progress behaviour into our models and program their LEGO robots themselves .
In May 1985 , Seymour Papert impose Denmark . Before heading to Billund to talk to Kjeld , he give a public lecture at Christiansborg to three hundred elementary school teachers about the future of learning for children in a technological gild . Papert ’s message was that computers could be a fantastic tool for suppressing pupil ’ creativeness , if that ’s what you wanted to do . But machines could also be used to liberate children ’s creativity and encourage their independence .
After the lecture , Seymour Papert mentioned to the diarist in attendance that the Media science lab at MIT in Boston had begin collaborating with LEGO . They were working on develop brick with built - in sensors — infrared photocells — so that golem could be program to respond to striking with a wall or other objects . Papert also tell them that the project would be quick for the American educational market within a few years ; they ’d offer the new , technologically advanced bricks to schools so that children could build golem , Harold Hart Crane , and vehicles out of LEGO elements , and control them on calculator , using the Logo computer programme .
Kjeld : We constitute a setup for developing LEGO in Boston , which would work closely with the Media Lab . I really felt an intellectual kinship with Seymour , which sound unassailable , but we communicated incredibly well when we met , which we did many times in the years that followed . We never used big , fancy words and recollective , unflawed condemnation . We ’d just sit together and philosophize a bit . He was n’t really a man of many words , but when he said something , it was nearly always meaningful .
Kjeld ’s faith in the conception of learning through drama took a adult leap forward in the later eighties , when LEGO and the MIT Media Lab developed software for LEGO ’s own poser in the LEGO Technic line . The first tangible result of this overseas collaboration was presented in 1986–1987 and named LEGO TC—“TC ” standing for Technic Control . Using different kinds of LEGO brick , a control box , and software system , educatee could now build a golem curb with Apple and IBM information processing system .
These set were make headway in American school as too soon as 1990 , by which time the consumption and demo of advanced technology had become an obligatory part of the curriculum . Developing tyke into problem solver and inventors was a pedagogic target . As Papert put it in the Wall Street Journal : “ Computers give our society , the first time , the alternative of decide whether we want to produce use - learn masses who do disciplined quotidian work and follow orders , or whether we want to give rise critical , creative minds . ”
This article originally appeared in The Lego Story by Jens Andersen . Courtesy of Mariner Books , an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers .
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