As a kid, Legos were much more interesting than Duplos: at the smaller
scale you could build much more complex things. Until Nora is older,
however, we're back to Duplos. Julia recently got a set of
Duplo-compatible marble run pieces [1], however, which have been a lot
of fun. They stay together better than the wooden
marble runs, and offer a lot more potential combinations than the
tubular
plastic ones.
While the special-purpose pieces are great, a lot of the fun has been
in figuring out how to misuse them, or in adapting normal Duplos.
Here's something I built yesterday that shows some of this:
For example, it starts with two straight marble pieces, intended to be
flat but that can be
convinced to sit at a steep angle:
Later it sends the marble through a bunch of pairs of smooth curved
normal pieces:
It can also run along the tops of railing pairs, which even lets you
do diagonals:
We also have a pair of slides from a playground kit, which are tricky
to use well because the ball goes so fast. Here I've cheated a bit by
having the ball slow way down when it hits the piece at the end of the
slide; much better to do a little drop and keep that speed, if you can
use it well:
I made an overly dramatic slow-motion video of it, set to one of the
draft tracks from the live album Cecilia and I are Kickstarting:
[1] Something like this. The
main downside is that the marble is a chokeable, but it's much easier
to keep one small object away from the baby than a large set of small
objects. And after each use we can put the marble away out of reach
even if we're not cleaning up everything else yet.
I strongly endorse this use of Duplo! I almost called it a minor misuse, but the whole point of the Lego system is to prompt creativity so Unqualified Well Done!
As a kid, Legos were much more interesting than Duplos: at the smaller scale you could build much more complex things. Until Nora is older, however, we're back to Duplos. Julia recently got a set of Duplo-compatible marble run pieces [1], however, which have been a lot of fun. They stay together better than the wooden marble runs, and offer a lot more potential combinations than the tubular plastic ones.
While the special-purpose pieces are great, a lot of the fun has been in figuring out how to misuse them, or in adapting normal Duplos. Here's something I built yesterday that shows some of this:
For example, it starts with two straight marble pieces, intended to be flat but that can be convinced to sit at a steep angle:
Later it sends the marble through a bunch of pairs of smooth curved normal pieces:
It can also run along the tops of railing pairs, which even lets you do diagonals:
We also have a pair of slides from a playground kit, which are tricky to use well because the ball goes so fast. Here I've cheated a bit by having the ball slow way down when it hits the piece at the end of the slide; much better to do a little drop and keep that speed, if you can use it well:
I made an overly dramatic slow-motion video of it, set to one of the draft tracks from the live album Cecilia and I are Kickstarting:
[1] Something like this. The main downside is that the marble is a chokeable, but it's much easier to keep one small object away from the baby than a large set of small objects. And after each use we can put the marble away out of reach even if we're not cleaning up everything else yet.