Over the Christmas holiday, the number of LEGO bricks in my house increased significantly. My son received LEGO sets as gifts from numerous grandparents, aunts and uncles. I was a LEGO fan when I was a child and now I have an excuse to play with them again as an adult. We've had lots of fun recently building sets and designing our own creations. At some point I became inspired to create a scale model of our home. Planning and BuildingI started this small project by building a test model to try out the proportions and to see what kinds of bricks I would need. The sizes of the door and window established the overall size. I continued revising the structure it until it looked right and then started collecting the bricks I needed. Building this model reminded me of working on an OpenMiddle.com math problem. In an "open middle" problem, there is a one starting point and one solution but many different paths to get to the solution. With LEGO, there are many different ways to create, revise and improve your model. There are lots of different building techniques that will all result in a well designed scale model. ScaleAfter I created my initial rough model I did some reading up on LEGO scale. It turns out that it is a fairly complex topic that lots of different people have investigated. I found the Brick Architect web site to be very helpful. For "classic minifigure" scale a ratio of 1:42 can be used. One major difficulty in discussing scale is that the proportions of a LEGO minifigure are not even close to the proportions of an actual person. A LEGO minifigure is about 4 cm tall and 1.6 cm wide. An average male human is about 175 cm tall and 40 cm wide... about half as wide as a minifigure would be at that height. Another challenge is converting units. The architectural drawings of my house are in feet, which I converted to metric (cm), then a scale factor is applied and finally the metric units are converted into LEGO bricks. I found an awesome tool that does this all for you, the LEGO Unit Converter. FinanceI used a lot of estimation to determine how many bricks of each type I would need. LEGO bricks are not cheap so you don't want to order more than you need (Check out Jon Orr's activity involving cost, Is LEGO Gender Biased?). I purchased the bricks I needed on BrickLink.com, a large online LEGO marketplace. BrickLink provides a detailed price guide for every brick available which makes it really easy to know if you're getting a good deal or not. I needed lots of 45 degree angle slope bricks for the roof of my house. These price stats let me know what a reasonable price is to pay for new or used bricks of this type. It is amazing to see how many bricks are sold on this site. I think that the stats from this site could make for an interesting grade 12 math research project. The Finished Project
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