Lego’s latest smart bricks entertain—but also reveal a big educational opportunity it has missed

Let’s first address the question of imagination and play, which links to Lego’s trajectory as a business. The company was founded in Denmark in 1932 as a manufacturer of wooden toys, its name derived from the Danish phrase ‘leg godt’ or ‘play well.’ Its interconnecting plastic blocks successfully drove sales until the early 2000s, when it faced $800 million in debt and almost had to shut shop.

Lego’s saving grace came from CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, who doubled down on strategic licensing partnerships with franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter. By 2015, it had overtaken Mattel to become the world’s largest toy company and its brand partnerships became a profitable moat as copycats proliferated.

The act of play arguably paid a price, as Lego increasingly focused on complicated sets that could be displayed as part of a collection, and were often aimed at adults.

Once upon a time, playing with Lego primarily meant raking through a tub of random rectangles, wheels and mini-figure heads to cobble together a peculiar looking house or rocket ship. Today, it also means following step-by-step instructions to complete a set, before leaving it to gather dust and picking up an iPad. Not great for stoking the imagination.

Any effort to get kids to actually play with their completed Lego sets is a good thing, especially when competition for their attention from screens is so fierce. And the Smart Bricks seem to work intuitively. Attach one to a $100 Star Wars X-wing fighter and it will make whooshing sounds when you glide the toy around the room, shooting noises when you press a button and can sense when it’s been ‘hit’ by a similarly decked out craft.

The Smart Bricks include a tiny, custom-made chip, an accelerometer, light and sound sensor, LED light and miniature speaker that can play the sound of craft being fatally struck, then exploding.

Sure, these low resolution sounds will replace the pew-pew-pew’s that kids make, but in an age where screens are luring them away from imaginative play already, that’s probably more of an incentive than a hindrance to pretending.

But it would be a shame for Lego to miss the obvious opportunity it has with Smart Bricks. What if they could teach kids how to program their own sequences of lights and sounds? What if you could take on the role of Dr. Frankenstein and build mechanical creatures that respond to touch, light and movement?

Lego actually made a big foray into robotics in the late 1990s with its Mindstorms line of robot kits, which also included programmable ‘smart bricks,’ motors and sensors for building and coding robots. The EV3, introduced in 2013, could be programmed to navigate a maze or sort objects by colour and you could get it as a blocky, humanoid figure or something more like a snake or scorpion, with a small screen and visible motors and wires.

But Mindstorms was shuttered in 2022 as Lego faced challenges from cheaper alternatives like open-source favourites Raspberry Pi and Arduino. The company ought to revive the educational ambitions it cultivated in the late 90s by bringing back a simplified, more affordable version of the Mindstorms line, perhaps with Smart Bricks that can be modified: a version for play like the kind launched this week, and one that can be programmed through a software interface.

On top of Lego’s successful partnerships with Hollywood, how about some tie-ups with coding platforms that are being used in schools, like Scratch or Code.org? A spokesperson for Lego declined to answer questions about potential robotics efforts and said the new line would “continue to expand and grow into the future."

It’s encouraging to see Lego use technology to innovate on its standard bricks, which I doubt will harm kids’ imaginations. But as they grow up in an age of artificial intelligence (AI), the company could also encourage mastery over technology, a stronger familiarity with systems thinking and an ability to figure out how complex processes work from the inside out.

They are going to need it. CES, the tech trade show where Lego announced Smart Bricks, was also dominated by humanoid robots from China that could play tennis and do Kung Fu kicks.

Robots and AI will undoubtedly shape the future that today’s youngest Lego users grow up in. The company could prepare them if it decides an educational ambition is worth pursuing again—which it almost certainly is. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.