This evening, I was bouncing through my Google Reader checking for a few feeds I haven’t caught up on in a while , and specifically, I wanted to move the GeekDad blog from Wired further up my list of feeds and catch up a little bit. It’s one I typically read for personal enjoyment, but tonight I noticed something that had my mind jumping with educational possibilities – at home with my kids or in formal learning environments.

Initially, I stumbled across an interesting post about Legos. One pointed to a post at Gizmodo with a video tour through LEGO’s “Secret Vault” that contains almost every LEGO set ever released – unopened and unused. It was an interesting trip down memory lane ;-)

Then I came across GeekDad’s post about the LEGO Digital Designer. That jump will tell you more, but in short, the Digital Designer (a free download as far as I can tell) makes it possible to design your own LEGO bricks and/or use the collection of over 700 bricks to design and build to your heart’s content. But, that’s not really the cool part. Once you have finished your build, the software will generate a parts list to create a custom kit to purchase – thus allowing you to then receive your custom set and build with real LEGO’s the same thing you built with the digital designer.

I can imagine really entertaining, authentic, creative, problem solving possibilities all the way up through undergraduate classrooms (a great, fun introduction to architecture?) Definitely worth a look.

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