My kids also have a lot of Legos (by volume, more than I ever had). When engaging in free play (i.e. not building a new set from the instructions), I find that the things they make tend to be much smaller than many of the things I built when I was a kid.
I think this makes sense. When I was a kid, for the most part I had a bunch of bricks, a bunch of girders, a bunch of plates, and a bunch of smaller, more specialized pieces, but the latter were used more for adding detail. So it was relatively easy for me to find the pieces I needed to make something decent sized and them embellish it.
When I look at my kids pile of Legos, it looks like 90% small, specialized pieces. As a kid, I remember spending a lot of time looking for that one piece that I knew I had if I could just find it. But nowadays, that situation is far, far more common.
The specialized pieces make for great looking creations on the outside of the box. In theory, they should also allow for great looking creations during free play, but in practice it ends up being too much trouble to find the pieces you need. And at that point, a new set looks even more enticing than spending all your time searching for pieces, so...
A modern ~550-piece set, also from a line aimed at kids, not one of the adult-aimed models: 3 minifigs, fills 1/3 cubic foot at best because 450 of the pieces are little 1x1 and 1x2 plates or similar. Finished set's too small for even kid hands to get in and play. If it gets messed up more than a very tiny bit, you'll probably have to re-build from scratch, because the construction is... very CAD, I guess. All surfaces clad in smooth bricks if at all possible, making adding on awkward.
The modern ones do have more cool mechanisms and gadgets, though. Also they include extra pieces for the small ones now, and more sets come with a brick tool. Those are all nice changes. But the sets themselves seem to be tuned for inflating part counts and looking nice on a box, not for play.
428-piece, 1-foot cube, $55, 4 minifigs, 1994: https://brickset.com/sets/6571-1/Flame-Fighters
540-piece, 1-foot cube, $69, 5 minifigs, 2022: https://brickset.com/sets/60320-1/Fire-Station
LEGO just has a much much larger catalog now than they did back then (200 sets vs 800 sets.) But the classic style sets are still there for you, if that's what you want.
Those outward-sloping windows in the 90's set were the bomb though, useful in so many cool applications - (star)ship bridges, towers, and the like. :D
EDIT: still, even if I have a weakness for even older fire sets, I acknowledge that the modern lego fire stations are very good toys. My son has spend countless hours playing with the 2016 version [0], which is incredibly playable, and whose fire truck is the best.
it's essential to organize them otherwise locating the piece of interest becomes too frustrating and time consuming. we use a stack of tool boxes from the hardware store to organize ours.
I help my kids by organizing their pieces by colour, with an extra box for "bits". So there's a grey box, red box, etc and a box full of minifigs and assorted non-building accessories.
Could this be that the constructions are the same scale but you have gotten bigger?
Indeed they are!
But, as much as I also dislike, like you, these bizarre comments; there's one place where I drew a red line and lego has sadly crossed it recently: lego sets that become obsoleted because lego removes some software from the app store. Previously, sets were standalone and eternal. But today you can buy an awesome technic set that will become "bricked" in a few years when they remove the controller software from the play store.
This is not a theoretical concern. It has already happened (even for sets that were still on sale!). It sucks big time and it is really sad.
If at least the apps were free software, we would have something to hang on to defend lego. But their current stance is indefensible.
As an aside I'm pretty sure my RCX IR towers use serial, not USB.
I failed abysmally at programming my Mindstorms robot. I could never figure out how to make two things happen at the same time, so I couldn't make both motors run at once. As a result, my treaded robot could only spin in circles.
Sadly, that was pretty much the end of my experience with Mindstorms. Eventually, I gave up and put it away, because it was such a frustrating experience.
I assume it would be easier for kids these days. It was a lot more difficult to find help on the internet in 1999.
The next generation, "NXT", was somewhat better (I believe it's based on LabView), but I remember it being ridiculously slow and unstable on Macs.
One of my kids uses Lego's "SPIKE Prime" at their robotics club, and while I haven't used the software myself, it seems much better.
Wasn't there a cheat sheet in the manual for the puzzles? I think I only solved one without copying everything. Way too hard for 11-12yo me.
Both versions exist. Mindstorms 1.0/1.5 had serial IR towers, 2.0 had USB.
there are some pi cases with lego pin-sized holes to help interface the two.
Lego has embraced the adult collector as a valuable customer. But that does not mean they have abandoned the children who just want to play with some Lego.
I totally understand Lego not putting any marketing power in that direction and pushing so hard for more branding and licensed sets.
The other end of the spectrum is their educational sets, but then we're really into the multi hundreds of dollars sets.
Most of these sets are sub-$50, so relatively affordable.
The promotional photos even echo that long-ago Lego ad the author laments as a bygone era, with a little girl building a house with no instructions (albeit the modern version is perhaps unrealistically restrained for something a kindergartner supposedly came up with).
Second hand buckets are around $10 if you buy from a store, and way less if you get them at a flee market or from families who don't use them anymore.
Sounds hippy and extreme, but I anecdotely know around ~20 people who went that route to start or grow their collection, and that's the advice I'd give people if asked. Lego seems to be the only toy people don't mind just getting second hand, machine wash in a net and start playing.
Bucket will stay in store as the anchoring price, and also to avoid having non Lego brand take that shell space, but I don't remember seing any marketing effort from Lego to push them in the last 10 or 20 years.
In my experience, old legos had a far more rigid feeling: idiomatically, sets relied heavily on the verticality of system (i.e. usage of the traditional tall or short bricks). Nowadays, sets come with a huge variety of 1x1 and 1x2 pieces with sideways elements, and a good portion of pieces are of the beam variety (i.e. pieces that require connectors to be put together[0], commonly found in mindstorm sets)
So with a modern mindstorms set, you can build some really elaborate things with high degrees of motion, in a way that is intended by Lego, but conversely, the traditional blocks look dull in comparison. I was building some random robots w/ my kids a while back, and the way we approached the bricks was fairly different. They largely build following the system as intended. My childhood techniques, by contrast, are distinctly "illegal" (according to what Lego considers valid/stable brick arrangements in official sets). For example, this[1] is a technique to achieve a movable joint that I used to chain together to create things like arms, animal tails, etc.
The entertainment environment for kids has also changed, through no fault of Lego itself. Despite the availability of high range of motion components, there are so many other ways for kids to entertain themselves nowadays that it would just never occur to them to exploit Legos in unintended ways the way I did.
[0] https://img.brickowl.com/files/image_cache/larger/lego-dark-...
It can only revolve a little before the next "button" hit the fork, right?
EDIT: Nvm it should be able to bend alot. I am going to steal that technique. =)
You can, of course, modify it to use a tall brick and some 1x1 flats to achieve a swiss-army knife setup[0] with a 360 degrees range of motion. I'd use this variation for things like retractable wings.
The problem now is that they have this expectation of gratification from making something kind of perfect and their own creations are less interesting and fulfilling.
I don't know what the name is for the idea that offering an "extra" optional path can detrimentally affect the other path. (I'd posit the same theory softly applies to Minecraft's creative mode.)
But might just be my experience.
I think one of the weirder parenting things is a parent trying to get their kiddo to like something in exactly the way the parent wants and anything else is a failure. "I built my Legos without instructions and we had fun! Kids these days...!"
But then parents don't realize they misunderstood the entire point from the beginning. Legos were never a magic device to make someone creative. They were always just a way to try and sneak creativity into people. It just doesn't always work. Some people pick up Legos and make castles and cars and all this stuff, while some people pick up Legos, make a box house, and give up.
Maybe your kiddo is secretly part of the gives up camp, but it's satisfying for them to follow to build instructions.
What matters as a parent is that you gave them an option to be creative. And that's super cool on its own, y'know?
Yet he's very creative with Magna-Tiles in exactly the same way we played with Legos when I was a kid (I was born in 1976). I do think part of the difference is the presentation and marketing of the set, and how specific some of the pieces obviously are. Yes, some kids can be very creative with these sets, but Lego the company would prefer you buy another set.
To me, that's the spirit of Lego. Even as a kid, I had friends who had, e.g., the Space Shuttle set, and once that shuttle got built, it was sacrosanct. If I tried to pilfer something from it, a blood feud would ensue.
My daughter is 8. She enjoys both Legos and Minecraft.
She mostly plays Minecraft in creative, but recently I've been playing through survival with her (first time survival for both of us).
She still enjoys building in survival. If anything, I would say her survival builds are more satisfying because she has to do the work of obtaining the resources, and crafting them into the parts she needs. There is also the added challenge of not being able to fly and to easily undo a misplaced block.
If I'm doing a complex build like an automated farm, she enjoys crafting the parts for me.
Back to Lego:
She mostly goes for the Lego Friends kits, but also has a few Lego Minecraft kits. After she'd built something, she does imaginative role play with her 6-yo sister. Sometimes, they'll take the kits apart and rebuild into something different.
Regarding temperament: My 8yo is pretty easy going. She is generally patient and doesn't get easily frustrated when things go wrong.
I could easily see how a different child could hate imperfect Lego builds, or survival Minecraft.
Even today I opened my mail to find a teddy bear valentine's heart Lego set from my girlfriend that is constructed from clever use of generic bricks, none of which would have been out of place in 1970s sets. In fact, I think Lego has become 100X more creative since the advent of the Internet, where people are making the more insane and elaborate constructions from the simplest bricks. It's become competitive in the nicest way.
Lego today is thriving and is better than it ever was.
We have a bunch of Star Wars sets and while the builds themselves are great, 90% of the fun has been breaking them down and building our own ships and designs. I watch him completely immersed in the world when he makes and flies these ships around, it's amazing. I hope we're still doing it when he's 13 too.
And then there's this weird idea that it is so complicated that you have to build it once and then never take it apart. Please, taking it apart was a huge amount of the fun for my son. He'd repurpose parts into his never ending scene that sprawled a 10x10 area in our family room. He (and us) would play with them literally daily for at least an hour, if not more, adding sets as they came along. Much of it stayed in bins, just because he had so much (youngest child of a youngest child, means you have lots of generous Aunts, Uncles, and cousins!).
Even now, at 13, he literally was putting a set together with is friend just yesterday. It's rarer now, since he likes the intense interactively of computer-based "legos" (People Playground, Minecraft, Garry's Mod, Teardown, and modding for other games, not to mention VR stuff).
Modern legos are awesome.