Lego Challenge–Mirror Worlds

It’s been awhile, but I have a new Lego challenge idea! Was looking through my old challenges and came up with an idea similar to my Monster Mash-Up challenge I did a few years back.

So this idea is about building a Mirror World! So you’d build one half of a car, or an animal, or a tree (like my example) and you’d build the other half to look one way, but the other half to look different. How similar or different is up to you! As always, what I build is an example, and should not be the metric to judge pieces. It’s just a way to get ideas going. I went a treehouse with one side normal, and the other side spooky/robotic, but it doesn’t have to be like that obviously.

So many potential learning devices here with this challenge. It’s a great way to talk about symmetry and some basic architecture, because if one side goes up a certain number of bricks, the other side probably will have to too. We can work on counting, since if a Lego minifig is 6 studs in from the center on one side, the other side will have to have another minifig 6 studs. And it’s a great way to do some teamwork–maybe one kid does one half, and the other kid does the other.

I originally posted about this idea BEFORE actually doing it; sometimes that’s just how my mind works. Someone commented that they their kiddos had problems so I made sure we all understood symmetry before we started building. I took a big yard stick and put over the center of a chair, so that they could see what symmetry is. We came up with a couple other things that had symmetry (like a car) and why it’s important in building. So after that, I cut them loose and told them we were playing with symmetry, and kinda downplayed the whole “Mirror World” theme I originally thought about. That might be too high concept, but explaining as a SYMMETRY challenge made it a lot more approachable.

Here’s what my kids made! Most of my kiddos really got into it and did the challenge, but you can see that some of them kinda “copied” my idea, which is why I try not to give them an example since I feel sometimes they feel pressured to do the same. But sometimes you definitely need an example for the challenges that are harder; so regardless, everyone seemed to really have fun!

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