Benefits Of Lego

Many gamers, both adult and children, enjoy Lego and there are more benefits of Lego above just having fun that you may not know about. Here are a few extra reasons to add some Lego to your next game order (maybe you can use these to convince your partners):

• Lego can be a great way to unwind if you feel stressed or anxious. Lego Group's Play Well Report 2022, 93% of adults regularly feel stressed, while 86% of adults claimed that play helps them to unwind.
• Playing with Lego can help improve hand-eye coordination. This is especially useful for young children but, is also great for the -old-age or anyone with special needs (these can be educational needs or day-to-day needs). This form of play is often used in therapeutic practices to improve a persons motor skills.
• As a natural consequence of playing with lego the person’s special reasoning and ability to visualise 3D spaces is improved slowly over time. This is especially useful in some trades and building fields. This play also leads to development in the planning and processing skills also.
• Some children, especially those with conditions such as ADHD, struggle to focus and pay attention for long periods of time. Playing with Lego allows them to work on their attention spans whilst doing this in a fun way. Naturally the child, or adult, will engage with the Lego tasks due to the fun natural and excitement they get out of trying to build something ‘cool’ that they can have at the end of the build.
• For Toddlers and young children, Lego allows their brains to develop through play, the child will think and analyse at a basic level as well as developing new skills the more they play with the Lego.
• There is no right or wrong, any colour or design can be adjusted and amended to suit your personality. Therefore, Lego is great for creative minds and people who think outside of the box.
• Very rarely will you complete a Lego project without making a mistake along the way. People who wish to become experts at Lego need to demonstrate and build high persistence levels and patience. In life it is hugely important to be able to stay Resilient to whatever life throws at us. Lego can help to build this resilience.
• Sometimes there can be a lot of problem solving involving in building something out of Lego. This means that the brain has to adapt and learn how to solve problems quickly. This is a great skill to have in your toolset.
• A lot of the time, at an earlier age especially, the Lego that you have is shared amongst many children/people and this can lead to the people using the Lego having to cooperate and play together effectively if they want to complete their own projects and also make it so that their peers can also make whatever Lego project they are working on. Naturally, this means that they are improving their team-work and communication skills (i.e. I can use that if you use this, etc…).
• For children 90% of the brain is developed by the age of 5. The more the brain is used before this point the better the development and thus the stronger the child’s mental faculties become.
• As a maths teacher I can also state that there is a great build up of mathematical skills in those that use Lego due to all the calculating they have to do when working out what pieces they need and how many different types of objects/pieces are required. This can also change on the fly so the mathematics behind what you are doing also needs to be adapted quickly. This is great for mental arithmetic.
• Children also are helped as this is symbolic play (or pretend play) and here they can act out situations and learn from the responses of the responsible adults/peers around them. This kind of role-play can be a huge help in a child’s emotional development.
• Mechano (Lego for older children as I see it) is a great tool to help engage students in engineering, electronics and mechanics. These can help give students the confidence and basic skills needed to enter these professions when they get older (we all know that these skills are sadly not really taught in schools even though they would be hugely beneficial to those students who are not particularly scholarly).
• Finally, at the end of a project there is a huge sense of satisfaction caused by a natural release of dopamine in the brain. This leads to a happier person and therefore less chance of mental health issues arising. This also helps to build a confident person due to the sense of success at the end of a build.

These are just a few of the benefits that building Lego can have for you and the people around you. There are of course other benefits that you may find and I have even witnessed Lego being used as a therapeutic aid for prisoners (in the UK).

Lego is said to help keep the prisoners minds calm and help them to learn to ‘think before they leap’. A lot of the prison population, around 75% according to the Government database (at gov.co.uk), are below the average education levels of the general population in the UK. Lego seems to be helping the poorly educated people in our prisons to learn right from wrong in a way that they have not had the chance to do in their lives prior to coming to prison.

Another one of the best benefits of Lego is that there are even educational Lego sets that schools can buy to help students improve their IT skills such as, coding. These skills are going to be essential as we move more and more into the digital age!

Lego may just be the solution to many of your problems. So, why not give it a go?

Let me know why you love Lego so much. Happy building friends, Dan (DB Games).