Author Biography

Skyler Jones is a freshman at Utah State University. He is the youngest of 5 children and if following in both theirs and his parents footsteps by attending Utah State University. Skyler loves the outdoors and being active. Skyler loves to travel, especially with his family, seeing all the wonders across the United States. He loves music, he loves to sing and he plays the trumpet. Skyler also loves airplanes and rockets and could spend countless hours telling you all about them. He wants to major in Mechanical Engineering with an Aerospace emphasis.

This essay was composed in March 2023 and uses MLA documentation.

Think back to when you were a kid, what was your favorite toy to play with? Was it toy trains? Barbies? Nerf guns? Puzzles? The toy that I grew up with the most was Lego. I remember getting my first set when I was about 6 years old. It made me so happy, and I would just spend hours playing with it. My collection grew over time, now I have hundreds of Lego Sets and I couldn’t be happier. You might be asking yourself now, what does Lego have to do with college students or other young adults? I am currently a college student and am now twenty-two years old and would consider myself what people of the Lego community refer to as an AFOL, an Adult Fan Of Lego. Lego has had a huge impact on my life and currently still does even though I am no longer a child, with what is still referred to as a children’s toy. Lego is going to help bring a new sense of joy and creativity that greatly benefits college students in multiple aspects of their lives. Let’s first look at a little history of Lego.

With a simple google search, you can learn that The Lego company started back in 1932 by a man named Ole Kirk Christiansen. The Name comes from the Danish word, “Leg Godt” meaning “play well.” He started by building just simple handmade wooden toys. He then moved on to manufacturing plastic bricks, and thus started the classic Lego we see and know today. So why is this important to know? Because the Lego Company has always wanted to inspire creativity in people, that is their purpose of this toy, creativity, and joy. Now what college student doesn’t want both of those things, creativity to help with schoolwork, and joy because that is especially hard to find in college with all the stress of classes and work. There was a study done at the Rutgers University Library on Lego and college students. Megan Lotts writes in “Playing with Lego, Learning about the Library, and making Campus Connections” that the hope of the Lego play station was to “engage students for whom she is a library liaison” (368). The play station that was installed was used for different class group projects and other events put on by the school and the library. For these students involved in these events and group projects, they said that they “appreciated being encouraged to learn by playing with toys, which is not something common in many university curricula” (Lotts 369).

Lego is a building block. If you were given only six, 2×4 bricks, do you know how many different and unique ways you could put those bricks together? You would probably think t a lot, and you would be right, 915,103,765 ways to be exact. That is a lot of different ways. Do you think you could come up with all 915 million? You would have to be quite creative to do it all on your own. That is what Lego is for though. It’s for creativity.  When it comes to college, we are asked to perform tasks and asked to do them in unique and creative ways sometimes. Sometimes we doubt our creative skills and don’t fully believe that we can do things creatively. Lego is just one of those things that can help with that. The ability to work out your brain by building anything you want with Lego can really help you with schoolwork. Wendi Dykes McGhee talks about a study done on creativity in “Constructing Creative Confidence with Lego Serious Play” how that “this study advocates creative confidence as a muscle to be developed, an attitude to be cultivated, and Lego Serious Play as a tool that can help to inspire such an action” (301). Similarly, teamwork was another skill that can be effectively grown by using Lego. Students who used Lego in a teambuilding project mentioned that it was helpful to their communication and the atmosphere of teamwork as shown in Natalia Martin-Cruz’s “A Lego Serious Play activity to help teamwork skills development amongst Business Students.”

If there is one thing that every college student has dealt with, it is stress. You might be wondering; how can Lego help with stress? Lego is a toy, it is meant to bring Joy and play, it can be a distraction as well. I made it a part of my normal routine when I would get home from high school, that I would spend some time playing with my Lego before I started on homework that day.  In fact, Wajahat Ali, who is a dad says in his article “The awesome power of quiet play.” That to him, Lego can “help anchor us to both joy and calm during a period of immense uncertainty and anxiety” (Wajahat). He goes on to talk about how it is a good escape in such a stressful world. This is coming from a forty-year-old man with children of his own, yet he purchases Lego for himself. Recently the market has swayed to show that numbers have steadily increasing in purchases for “kidults” people 12 years of age and older. Eliana Dockterman mentions in “Not Just Child’s Play” that “An NPD survey found that kidults bought 24% of all toys June 2021 to June 2022” (Dockterman, 66). Lego also started a new line of products in its brand that are labeled ages 18+ and has sets and themes that are directed toward older audiences, such as Wajahat and others like you and me. Its within reason to know that there is a market out there for adults and that it can be more focused towards them and not just based on children’s toys or themes. Each of these sets have higher piece counts and more complex building techniques which require more advanced coordination and even patience. Especially since some of these larger sets will take hours of time to put together.

When it comes to social media there are quite a few older people who spend time showing off Lego. On YouTube, some of the more popular channels like MandRproductions, Solid Brix Studios, Ashnflash, and BrickVault, have anywhere from 250,000 to almost 700,000 subscribers, and these are adults who run these channels, all of them being anywhere from their mid-twenties, to their late thirties. They have spent countless hours purchasing and building Lego. This has become not only a passion, but also a career for some of these people. Even on other social media channels, there are many adult influencers who show off their collections and the happiness that Lego brings to them. Lego has a whole community that supports them. Jeff Nack mentions in “For Lego, Adult Fans aren’t Child’s Play” When “The Lego Movie” came out in 2014, that 7 was “the number of seconds in the movie crowdsourced from fans” (Nack). Along with that community, Lego has a site where normal people can pitch ideas to create sets that they have created, and if they reach 10,000 votes, Lego will review the set to potentially become a product to sell. Multiple sets a year a created due to this and not even all of them make it past Legos review phase even though they reached the 10,000 votes. Patricia Treble even mentions in “Please Don’t Touch Daddy’s Lego” that many “believe the number of adult aficionados has doubled in recent years, though no one has solid statistics… At Lego exhibits… one-third of the visitors will be adults” (Treble). With this growing group of people, it shows that no matter what age you can join the community and enjoy it for yourself.

One issue that is easy to address with this whole situation is the financial part of Lego. Lego is quite expensive. For example, Lego sells a 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon, its retail price, $849.99. No child is going to ever buy that set with their own money, this is a set that is first off directed at an adult market, but that still is a very expensive set. It would be rare for a college student to spend that kind of money on a set when they are trying to pay for tuition. You can also ask anyone in the Lego community, and they will tell you that there have been some recent price increases just alone in the year 2023. Lego is a business, and they still want growth and sometimes this is just the case, However, just because Lego can be expensive, does not mean that you must spend a lot of money on Lego. There are always smaller, more affordable sets that they sell, and to just get some of those and start small and enjoy even some of these smaller sets can bring a good sense of joy and still provide a creative application.

Lego is Still one of my personal favorite things to collect, and it has really helped me relieve stress, and just a happy hobby to have as well. There really is a lot of positives to Lego and you don’t have to be an avid collector to still enjoy Lego. It truly does help with creativity and teamwork, as well as a good stress reliever and can really bring a smile to your face. Who doesn’t want to be happy while struggling through college life. Lego really can be for anyone and can really be a source to build anything you can imagine as a pass time. Even the nostalgia that it can bring can just ease the burdens of life and bring some joy to your life. The Lego company has made it their motto that “Only the best is good enough” and Lego truly is the best in my book.

Works Cited

Neff, Jack. “For Lego, Adult Fans Aren’t Child’s Play.” Advertising Age, vol. 85, no. 11, May 2014, p. 27. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=96052945&site=ehost-live.

Ali, Wajahat. “The Awesome Power of Quiet Play.” Men’s Health, vol. 37, no. 1, Jan. 2022, p. 44.

Dockterman, Eliana, et al. “Not Just Child’s Play.” TIME Magazine, vol. 200, no. 21/22, Dec. 2022, pp. 66–69. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=160361547&site=ehost-live.

McGehee, Wendi Dykes. “Constructing Creative Confidence with Lego® Serious Play®.” Journal of Behavioral & Applied Management, vol. 22, no. 2, Apr. 2022, pp. 278–306. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.dist.lib.usu.edu/10.21818/001c.38522.

Martin-Cruz, Natalia, et al. “A LEGO® Serious Play Activity to Help Teamwork Skills Development amongst Business Students.” International Journal of Research & Method in Education, vol. 45, no. 5, Nov. 2022, pp. 479–94. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.dist.lib.usu.edu/10.1080/1743727X.2021.1990881.

Lotts, Megan. “Playing with LEGO®, Learning about the Library, and ‘Making’ Campus Connections: The Rutgers University Art Library Lego Playing Station, Part One.” Journal of Library Administration, vol. 56, no. 4, May 2016, pp. 359–80. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.dist.lib.usu.edu/10.1080/01930826.2016.1168252.

Treble, Patricia. “Please Don’t Touch Daddy’s Lego.” Maclean’s, vol. 121, no. 39, Oct. 2008, p. 78. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=34715647&site=ehost-live.