LEGO® turned 80 last August, and as a dedicated fan, I failed by not making a proper tribute (other than my Facebook posts and tweets about it; college really is a wild and very BUSY ride).
Note: I submitted this for my English 12 class last year as my "expanded personal essay," which is a mixture of the personal essay and research paper, thus, it will be a bit "jumpy." (You'll understand once you read it.)
Objectives:
"Consider for your topic something personal—say, a belief, an interest, an experience. Find a connection between this personal matter and something that is not personal.
Explore this connection and see how that connection illuminates the personal matter."
I also made some tweaks here and there so it's not really the original. Well, I hope it is better than the original. At the end of the post, I put the annotated bibliography for my work and my professor's comments (just a note though, his comments were made before I edited my work). If you have any, please do! I would be more than happy to gain insights to improve my work :)
Hope you enjoy it!
Again, Belated Happy Birthday LEGO®!
Collecting
the bricks & pieces of my life
Bricks
The
Lego Brick: 29, 700, 000 search results on Google.
Around
20, 000, 000, 000 produced every year.
Zero
bricks I had when I was a child.
---
The small
office room of the junkshop has two chairs, a window, a locked cabinet stuffed
with files in one corner, a table next to the window, a desktop computer beside
the table, and a vault underneath the table. A little girl is sitting on the
chair across the computer. Beside her is a larger yet empty chair. The man
who’s supposed to sit on it is away for a while, tending to other matters. The
low-pitch chugging of the air conditioner is the only sound in the room sans
the rhythmic tapping of pen on paper. The girl is writing on a timecard she got
from the shelf near the computer. She imagines it would be a delight to punch
in a timecard every morning and afternoon at work. Perhaps, someday, she would
get to work in that man’s office.
---
How she loved writing on timecards! She had
a strange longing to fill all the empty brown spaces of the rigid paper with
words and numbers and whatever comes to her mind, using only the black gel-pen
the man would lend her. She would write
down her subjects at school in a column and adjacent to them, their
corresponding time slots. On the back of the paper, she would write the
homework she had to do for the day.
Once in a while, the man would ask her to do
something for him and for a certain number of tasks done, he would give her a
brown rectangular piece of paper with a man’s face printed on it—the ten-peso
bill. She would then give it to the lady at the sari-sari store that was right
next door. The lady would give her strawberry-flavored candies that went by the
name Potchi. She felt like she was
working for the man by doing the tasks and getting candy in exchange. She
thought that somehow she was helping him in the shop.
---
He has finally come back. The door swings
open for about seven seconds, letting the hot air outside replace the cold
breeze inside. Every time, he would open it like that, and every time she would
smile and call out “Daddy!” It’s time to go home. They walk past the timecard
machine. She finds out her father does not have a timecard. She figures because
he owns the junkshop, he doesn’t need to have one.
The girl’s mini dates with her father would
go on like this until the end of elementary school: every day, after class, the
girl’s mother would fetch her and would drop her off at her father’s office. This was her world, and how small it seems to
be now.
---
1932 was the year it all started, in Ole
Kirk Christiansen's (OKC) toyshop in the village of Billund, Denmark. Although
only twelve years of age, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen was already helping out in
his father's shop. By the late 1940's, all of Ole
Kirk Christiansen’s sons were working in the factory. Three generations of
Christiansen’s would continue to dominate the company until Jørgen Vig Knudstorp takes over as CEO in 2004.
In 1934, OKC devised a contest among his
employees to come up with the best name for the expanding company, but it was
fated that he would be the one to think of “Lego,” which came from the Danish
phrase, “leg godt,” meaning “play well.”
Wooden toys,
piggy banks, cars, and trucks were the first products OKC manufactured in his
shop. They were quite successful but the business boomed when Lego began
producing its first plastic toys in the 1940s.
Based on an original patent by Kiddicraft, interlocking bricks made from
cellulose acetate were first produced by Lego in 1949. Lego called these
“Automatic Binding Bricks.”
---
The little girl had no idea what Lego bricks
were at that time. She had no idea that there existed multi-colored
interlocking bricks which one can use to build a house, a town, a car, almost
anything one can think of. The brown hue
of the papers and the black of the ink, the pink and white of the candies—only
those colored her world. It might have occurred to her (if she knew about these
bricks) that the only thing better with her toys was the fact that she could
eat the candies.
Whenever she heard the word, “bricks,” she
would think of the walls of their front porch that were made of bricks. She has
always loved the look of their front porch, the way it seems to welcome her after
a long day at school. In fact, she loved the whole house. She took great
pleasure in the fact that this house was bought because of her, that this house
was bought at the time her mother was pregnant with her. Her father decided that they had to move from
their former house because their family of five was growing and needed more
space.
For other people, their house would seem to be
an ordinary one, for they would only look at its physical structure. But to
her, it was home because of the memories she shared with it. The way she
treasured it was not so different from how a child would treasure his favorite
toy. If other kids had Lego houses or dollhouses, she had this, and it was so
much better because the figurines she gets to play with actually talk, walk,
eat with her, and most of all, they had the capability to love her. Each piece of the furniture, of the bricks on the walls,
of the tiles on the floors, is different, is important, very much like how
every bit of Lego brick is important for the foundation of every house, town or
figure the bricks create.
***
Plates
If you ever ran out of standard brick, you
can solve the problem just by stacking three plates together as a substitute.
They may be three times shorter than bricks, but they’re named the same way:
width by length, using the number of studs; for example, a 2x4 brick. But the
girl of eight or nine would have no access to this “knowledge” until six years
later.
---
The idea struck her mind during dinnertime.
For the young girl, the father's voice
produced a symphony of wonderful tales and jokes amidst the din of spoons and
forks clattering on plates. It was during one such dinnertime that the young
girl found out that her father was not able to achieve his dream of becoming an
engineer specializing in electronics and communications engineering. “Mahirap noon,” her father said. “Wala kaming pera noon kaya hindi ako
nakapagtapos ng ECE eh.”
Many times, the father would talk on and on
about his beliefs, his ideals, his stories at the dinner table. On rare
occasions, though, he would just eat silently. At times, he even seemed to move
his forks and spoons about listlessly. The girl had always found that odd. She
wanted to somehow solve the mystery of her father’s silence, and one day, she
succeeded in doing so, during dinnertime too.
---
She is looking at the lines on his face, the
tuffs of white hair growing on his scalp. He is probably tired… tired from the
heat of the sun at the junkshop, tired from working hard to send his children
to school. The wave of this epiphany plunges her into a trench of guilt.
Perhaps, partly because of her, her father had not been able to achieve his
aspirations in life. At that moment, she makes a silent vow to continue his
dream for him. She promises to herself that she would be an industrious student
so that she would be able to at least fully utilize the money her father had
paid for her education. Out of diligence and perhaps, luck, she gets into a
public science high school.
***
Programming
Third
year robotics class would not be her first encounter with robots, but it would
be with anything Lego: the bricks, the plates, its history and everything else.
Her father had constructed a spider-like robot before with a motion sensor that
enabled it to avoid walls and other obstacles. But the thing with the Lego
Mindstorms RCX set at school is one can build anything with it—an animal, a
robot that could carry a rose to your prom date a real working Lego fan (yes,
someone did use it for this purpose), a merry-go-round that really goes
around—even if one is not an engineer. Lego did keep true to its history; the
word, “Lego” can be interpreted in Latin as “I put together.” Simply put,
Mindstorms is Lego combined with robotics.
---
“Det bedste er ikke for godt” is The
Lego Group’s (TLG) motto, meaning, “Only the best is good enough.” Started as a
one-man workshop by Christiansen, Lego has strived and has proven itself to be
one of the best not just in the line of toys, but also in innovation and
education. Learning about this in class, the girl marveled at how TLG has
gone through so much to be more than just a toy company.
---
The student is sitting down on the
floor with her legs crossed. She and five other people make up a small circle
in the computer laboratory. As per protocol, she is listing down the different
bricks, plates and gears her group has used to make their own Lego
merry-go-round.
Bricks,
plates, and beams? Check. RCX? Check.
A
creator must keep in mind that a machine needs its brain. Take a blueprint from
your imagination and input all your ideas on your Robot Command Explorer brick
via computer. This ”intelligent” brick can use various input sensors from its
environment, crunch the numbers, and send the proper output to set to work the
various motors for mechanical movement. Finally, to make the robot move, one
simply presses the run button on the RCX.
The
RCX with its motors and sensors may be the crowning glory of LEGO Mindstorms
but a LEGO robot is still nothing without the plain bricks, plates, beams and
gears that give it its basic structure. A platform needs its foundation, a box
needs its frame, and a car needs its wheels. All the electronics would be for
naught if there were no parts to transmit the force and provide a mode of
movement. Thus, one needs to become an adept builder before one tries his hand
at the much more complicated field of electronics and programming.
---
The
student had finally realized why her father had fallen in love with engineering
and why many people have gone through their childhood with Lego bricks.
Ultimately, she became crazy about it like how kids would be for their first
Lego house sets. She searched for random trivia about Lego’s history, about
other Lego merchandise, and about how Lego bricks are made.
Lego
Mindstorms is a two-sided story; one learns how to play well and think
well—exactly what Lego intended. Building a robot from the Mindstorms set is
not purely for work, nor is it a simple set of toys, the girl thought. The Mindstorms set demands imagination,
creativity as well as feasibility. This was the challenge that would inspire
her and push her to her limits. This was how she came to embrace the Group’s
motto, how she came to form her life around it. With this in mind, she strived
to attain grades that would later help her get into one of the best
universities in the country.
***
Trial tests 1, 2, 3
Failures,
trials, and disappointments are bound to slow someone down on the road to his or her dreams. There were, in fact,
times when the girl got mediocre grades. There were times when bricks and
plates would fall out of the robot the student constructed because the whole
structure was not stable enough. Sometimes, a tiny brick or plate would be
missing. Other times, the robot would just not do what it was programmed to do.
On rare occasions, the student would get mini heart attacks when the RCX
accidentally falls off someone’s hands.
---
She is sitting on her armchair in her
classroom. She is still in third year high school. She is crying softly to
herself so as to not attract attention. She has failed yet another test in
physics. This is not good. If she wants to take up engineering, she has to
improve on this.
---
The first fire
happened in 1942. Godtfred and his brother Karl were playing in the shop and
accidentally set fire to some wood shavings with a glue smelter while their
parents were napping. The whole shop and the house went up in flames. OKC
recovered and built a new workshop.
Then, on the night of March 22, 1942, a
short circuit caused an electrical fire in the factory; the factory and
warehouse burned to the ground. Just like before, OKC started again from
scratch to build a new factory at the same place.
Finally, on
February 4, 1960, the wooden toy warehouse was struck by lightning; the entire
building was destroyed by fire. After 28 years of production, TLG decided to
stop manufacturing wooden toys altogether, but the memory of the success of
these toys shall never be forgotten.
---
She is now in
college; she is studying in one of the universities she has had her eyes on.
But her heart aches. She still remembers it up to this day—how a fire had shattered
her innocence years ago.
The news about the fire that almost engulfed
her father’s shop had cracked the visor that kept her eyes shut from life’s
pains, from the reality of calamities. Before, such things were only abstract
to her. She had no idea what it felt like until she experienced such herself.
She was not on the scene when it happened, but now she understood how easy it
is for the thing that was paying her tuition to just vanish in a thirty-minute
blaze, without her permission, without caring about the hard work her father
did, without caring about her dreams.
Recent fire incidents near the girl’s
college campus had replayed in her mind the bitter, faint memories—the panic,
the shock, the worries, and the pain of knowing one cannot help. She asks her
father about it but she is careful not to induce a sad response. Her father
cannot remember when it happened. No one in the family could. It seems as if
everyone wanted to completely erase that certain memory so as to live as if it
never happened.
But this isn’t the only mystery in the girl’s
life. While the history of Lego is kept safe with accounts of important
incidents recorded, the Fates keep the history of the girl’s lineage a secret.
She knows little about her grandparents, especially her father’s father. She
only knows that he was Chinese, he migrated to the Philippines and eventually
married a Filipina, her grandmother. One time, she asked when he was born, no
one knows. Her father said that anyone who might have known died long, long
ago, even her mother. He said that on his birth certificate, it is written that
he had no father (no matter how impossible that was) because the Chinese who
migrated to the country were looked down upon by society. His father died when
he was still a young child. He could barely remember how his father looked
like, how he talked. The girl concluded that the Christiansen family should be
grateful that their history is known and kept alive by the limitless influence
of their established brand name.
***
LEt GO and… Run!
Sixty-two
years after the birth of the first Lego brick and two months before her
father’s fifty-sixth birthday, the girl enrolled to take up BS Management,
Major in Communications Technology Management—something an aspiring engineer
would not choose. She arrived at this
decision because somewhere along the way, she learned that she has programmed
herself like a robot with Lego’s motto and with achieving the dreams her father
failed to accomplish. She discovered that she did not have to give up her other
interests such as that in photography, in theater, in Japanese studies, just so
she could continue her father’s dream. She realized that her father was not in
any way pushing her to do what he wanted for himself years ago. But he is there
to guide her still. She pushed herself too hard in a certain direction that was
not meant for her, and perhaps her mediocre grades in engineering-related
subjects in high school was fate’s way of guiding her to where she is now. And
so she found a compromise between her father’s dreams and her own in Ateneo’s
ComTech program, without giving up her belief in “Only the best is good
enough.” Besides, in a university where the culture of magis is upheld, she should still do her best to abide by her
motto.
Perhaps,
the girl should get her butt out of her chair. It is high time for the
not-so-little girl to push the run button. For most of her life, all she did
was sit down, observe and reflect. TLG didn’t stop at producing plastic bricks
so that should be a good enough reason for her to never settle for just one
thing. Now that she has worked out how the bricks and gears of her life fit
each other to make a wonderful, living, breathing structure that is the
entirety of her, the next step probably would be to make way for newer bricks
to fit in too. With this knowledge, she will run forward now and put the words
of her motto into actions so that great things will come from the bits of
herself written in this piece.
Annotated
Bibliography:
Diaz,
J. (2008, June 26). Everything you always wanted to know about Lego. Gizmodo:
The Lego Mega-Guide. Retrieved from
http://gizmodo.com/5019797/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-lego
This
is where I got the statistics about the number of Lego bricks produced each
year.
Hystad,
D. (2002, September 23). Building Lego Robots for First Lego League. Retrieved
from http://neuron.eng.wayne.edu/LEGO_ROBOTICS/lego_building_tutorial.pdf
This
file is a building tutorial, complete with the names and use of all the parts
of the Lego Mindstorms set. This was also the basis of the tutorials for our
robotics class by our teacher, Miss Thess Tayamora.
Istok,
G. (n.d.). The Lego Brick – The Early History. Retrieved from
http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/KarstenJopke/Dokumentationen/pre-info-lego-chapter-1-part-1.pdf
This
article gives a detailed timeline of the different products of Lego throughout
the years.
Lego
Mindstorms NXT: A Review and History of the Next Generation of Robotics, NXT.
(n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.educationaltoyskidslove.com/review-history-lego-mindstorms-nxt.html
This
article gives a brief overview of the history of the Lego Mindstorms and the
set’s important parts.
Mortensen,
T. F. (2012, January 9). The Lego history: Timeline 1932-1939. Retrieved from
http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/lego-group/the_lego_history/1930/
This
is the official Lego website. The website has a detailed timeline of the Lego
industry. This specific URL is about the very start of Lego in 1932.
Mortensen,
T. F. (2012, January 9). The Lego history: Timeline 1932-1939. Retrieved from
http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/lego-group/the_lego_history/1960/
This
specific URL talks about the fire of 1960.
Ole
Kirk Christiansen. (n.d.). Retrieved March 14, 2012 from the Lego Wiki: http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Ole_Kirk_Christiansen
This
article gives a detailed account of OKC’s life and of the three fire incidents.
Tidd,
J. & Bessant, J. (2009). Managing Innovation: Lego. Retrieved from
http://www.managing-innovation.com/case_studies/Lego.pdf
This
article talks about the history of the Lego brick and the development of the
company.
-----
Very good. A clever idea
to find a parallel between Lego and your own life. The language could be just a
bit better, and the last few paragraphs push the Lego–life connection a little
too far. But still, wonderful work.
Oh if you want to know more about Lego, here's a link to an animated video that will inspire you!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdDU_BBJW9Y&feature=share