900 Million Possibilities from Just 6 Blocks! What LEGO Ducks Teach Us About the Joy of Thinking
I’m Ken Kuwako, your Science Trainer. Every day is an experiment.
If someone told you, “Build a duck using six blocks,” what kind of duck would you imagine? Surprisingly, even if you gave the exact same instructions to an entire class, no two ducks would ever turn out exactly alike. This simple little “duck-building” activity ended up changing the way my students approached science experiments. Let me tell you how.
Telling students, “Be more proactive!” or “Get involved!” only gets you so far. On the other hand, when students carry out an experiment without a clear sense of purpose, their conclusions often end up looking like something copied straight from the textbook. What I really want is for them to look at their experimental results and come up with their own ideas about what those results might mean.
That’s where the “Duck Workshop” using LEGO Education came in. I started inserting this five-minute activity just before experiments, and little by little, I began to see a change in the way students engaged with their experiments.
Let’s Build a Duck with LEGO!
Inside each bag are six LEGO bricks.
Using these six bricks, each student builds their own duck. The fun part is that they can use all six pieces or only some of them. They have just one minute. Ready, set, build!
Once everyone has finished, students show their creations to the people sitting nearby. They explain their designs to their neighbors and talk about why they built their ducks the way they did.
Why Did You Put the Beak There? — Discoveries Through Conversation
Students put their design choices into words, explaining things like why they decided to place the beak in a particular spot. Then, their classmates get a chance to ask questions. Once this exchange is over, we line up all the ducks on the desks and take a good look at them together.
When you actually do this activity, each student starts out thinking, “Well, obviously, this is what a duck looks like!” But when all the finished creations are placed side by side, you can’t help but be amazed by the incredible variety of “ducks” sitting in front of you.
Not a single one is exactly the same.
In other words, students can see right before their eyes that there isn’t always just one correct answer.
A World of “About 900 Million Possibilities” from Just Six Bricks
As it turns out, there’s some fascinating mathematics behind this diversity. In theory, there are 24 possible combinations when you connect two basic bricks with eight studs each. With three bricks, that number jumps to 1,060. And with six bricks, you can create an astonishing 900 million different configurations. Every additional brick makes the number of possibilities explode.
That’s another fascinating mathematical world hiding inside a simple LEGO activity.
The important thing is that none of these creations is “wrong.” Each student has their own idea of what a duck should look like, and this activity makes that beautifully clear. Students also naturally begin noticing what is interesting about other people’s creations. Before long, you start hearing comments from all around the room like, “Oh, I never thought of building it that way!”
There Isn’t Always Just One “Answer” in the Real World
In the real world, there is rarely just one answer to a problem. In fact, sometimes we don’t even know what the actual problem is in the first place.
As this duck activity shows us, the themes teachers present, the ways students approach them, and the answers they come up with can all be virtually limitless. It seems that LEGO’s philosophy is that this diversity is precisely what makes us human.
This is how I use the activity, but there are plenty of other possibilities, too. For example, one biology teacher told me that they use the activity at the beginning of a classification lesson and then have students classify the ducks they have created.
Ducks with legs. Ducks without legs. Ducks with red beaks. Ducks with yellow beaks.
Students can practice classifying the same collection of objects from all sorts of different perspectives. I think it’s a wonderfully flexible activity that can be used not only in science, but also in biology and other subjects.
Amazon sometimes shows the item as out of stock, but when I contacted Narika Co., Ltd. directly, I was able to purchase it in bulk.
The “Duck Workshop” is simple, versatile, and surprisingly useful. Why not give it a try in your own classroom?
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I want to make the wonders and excitement of science a little more accessible to everyone! On this blog, I share fun science experiments you can try at home, along with easy-to-understand tips and tricks. Feel free to explore and search around!
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