BrickUniverse: Worlds of Fun for Lego Lovers

Our family (including a few of the grandkids) spent the day in Dallas yesterday, visiting Nana and attending the BrickUniverse Lego Fan Fest at the Irving Convention Center (courtesy of a US Family Guide Blogger Promotion).

Our kids are all huge Lego fans, so this convention was right up their alley.

The Fan Fest featured a fabulous assortment of hands-on activities. There were robotic competitions…

timed challenges, coloring and craft stations…

a gigantic inflatable slide (an especial favorite among our youngest attendees)…

and lots of building stations with thousands and thousands of bricks where kids can create to their heart’s content.

In addition to the white architectural Legos pictured here, they had many more colorful building stations — but I was too busy trying to keep the kids and grandkids from scattering to photograph them all!

There were separate stations showcasing several different lines of Lego products, including Bionicles, Duplos, Star Wars…

CityScape, huge construction blocks for building castles and playhouses, and a sweet little section of “My Friend” Legos tucked away in the corner of the convention center.

That’s where Mom and Abby spent most of their building time. This corner was less popular than a lot of the flashier activity centers, and when it was time to go, Dad and the boys circled the convention center three times before they found us there. But find us they did, much to Abigail’s disappointment that we had to leave:

Besides all the hands-on activities, Brick Universe features many impressive and inspirational lego creations made by other Lego enthusiasts. Creations included quaint villages…

famous buildings and city skylines…

massive bridges…

fun statuary…

and some amazing works of art.

They also had some really cool machines on display, including spinning tops, ferris wheels, and other mechanical toys. My favorite was the puzzle-solving robots, like this incredible Rubik’s Cube Hacker.

If you cannot see the embedded video, click here to view it.

It scans the mixed-up cube, analyzes all the patterns, accesses its database of a hundred million, million algorithms to determine how to solve the puzzle in the fewest number of moves, then executes the moves. It was fascinating to watch it run through this entire process, usually in under a minute. (View the video above to see it in action.)

BrickUniverse continues through today, so if you and your little Lego fans live locally, you may want to check them out. Follow this link for discounted tickets.

Don’t live close enough to attend? Then check out this post for lots of fun (and free!) Lego activities you can do right at home: Fun for Fellow Lego Fans