Sharknado vs. Dozer

How do you keep your kids from too much screen time?

Setting limits on media is a real struggle for parents in a digital age.

Distracting kids with quality alternatives is one of our family’s ongoing goals – especially activities that encourage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). For our family Legos have been a favorite option that meet that criteria, both entertaining for kids and adults alike.

One aspect of Legos that even life-long fans know nothing about is called Pick-A-Brick. Inside Lego amusement parks or mall retail stores, you’ll find an entire wall of bulk Lego parts for sale. Customers fill a cup with whatever they want for a flat fee. The wall is constantly changing and usually has several basic brick options but also a few specialty pieces like plant parts, flags or car chassis.

A typical PAB wall in the Seattle Metro area

What’s great about this method of Lego collection is that you can get lots of the same pieces. Most Lego sets come with a few of each piece like black pie wedges, wheels or antennas. But when you buy pieces by the dozen, suddenly you can create interesting textures or modular creations like scaffolding or scales using lots of repetitive parts.

What could you make if you had 50 of these?

Or these?

Lego fans usually fall into two camps: those who build the sets and then leave them assembled, and those who throw everything into a bin and wind up building Frankenstein creations. Only the most dedicated collectors and AFOL’s (Adult Fans of Lego) have organized bins of bulk pieces.

The first night of building after buying a large cup at the PAB wall. Fleets of little ships, scaffolding with a bridge and a robot. They lasted until noon of the following day.

But when using the PAB wall, you can begin to hybridize these two styles by adding small quantities of random bulk parts to your Lego collection. What can you can make using a hundred white teeth or dozens of hinges?

Last week our extended family gathered in Manzanita, Oregon for a week-long vacation at the coast. It’s the stuff of dreamy summer downtime with ample time to read a book and take a nap between playing in the waves and running on Oregon’s vast beach landscape.

During the down time, it was tempting for the kids to fall back into video game and YouTube routines. But once we laid out a table full of PAB parts, it was just as tempting to sit down and design little creations.

Our family is big into the popular Discovery Chanel show BattleBots, so during our week at the coast, our Pick-a-Brick bag transformed into an army of little Lego BattleBots.

Plant parts became saw blades and slope pieces became razor sharp knives. Little eyes gave our bots personality.

Let the Bot Battle Begin!

The crowd goes wild!

Here are some of the Lego robots that we created during our stay (and recorded forever in history since they’re now in a million pieces).

Sharknado was the first bot to come to life and remains my personal favorite. A spinning bot with lots of razor teeth, it’s durable, easy to fix and cute!

Big House was a formidable bot with speed, weight and a massive spinning cutting tool on the front

Panda Express uses speed and a wicked screw weapon on the front.  Don’t lose sight of the little flipper in the back!

Flipper was great at turning opponents upside down, but was delicate and stopped working after a few hits.

Joust is a ramming specialist.  As you would expect with a name like Joust.

Sit-N-Spin walks like a spider and it’s top half is a rotating shredder

Dozer uses a lifting wedge in the front to flip bots and push them off the board.

Stegosaurus has spiky balls on his legs for kicking and giant grabbers in the front that hold opponents in place for the flame throwers to do their damage

Beast has lots of tiny missiles and was the pride and joy of our 4-year-old. It never lost a bout because – who can withstand a barrage of 30-some missiles?