The love of Lego® is reaching far and wide at BU. Every Lego® Serious Play® session is crafted to meet session aims, objectives and intended learning outcomes with reflective questions integrated to get the maximum out of the time windows afforded within the timetabled slots. Working with so many areas across BU is fascinating; from research leadership builds with senior academics, to the Economic and Social Research Council Festival of Learning, to Medical Monsters with children looking at anxiety related builds, which shows the complete cross section and diversity.
The way the session draws people together is fascinating and is down to the fun, creative, engaging, and inclusive framing and phases that participants are walked through to become metaphoric storytellers. Those that are apprehensive about the concept of being creative surprise themselves in the process. Tables lean in listening to the sharing and collaboration. When capturing feedback people often say the session was ‘surprising,’ ‘memorable’ and ‘producing meaningful outcomes.’
The versatility of the method needs to be considered, especially working in the new normal of campus life, because Lego® Serious Play® sessions can be delivered face to face, hybrid and online. It can be used as a one-off team building session for a unit or programme, used for summative activities, group collaboration and longitudinally in a unit or PhD to support individual, group, system builds and meta models. Perhaps the fairy dust that some may not consider is the integration of the use of Kahoot, Miro, Mural, Padlet and Mentimeter to enhance the process for learning and reflection.
Some outstanding highlights have been the work with the employability team focusing on unlocking the student entrepreneurs at BU to take the next steps in realising their potential, and collaborating with the library team to look at academic integrity to help support students next academic year. Looking to the very near future the delivery will be expanding to the Physician Associate Studies.
Lego® Serious Play® is an enabler and change agent for both those delivering and participating because no session is the same, learning is continuous, knowledge transfer cycles, and even with the same bricks the builds are unique, which simply shows the magic that is Lego®. The Centre for Fusion Learning Innovation and Excellence at BU (FLIE) is embracing the interest in the method and has ethics approval across the university to capture the impact effectively to demonstrate its power, but also showcase the innovation of academics across faculties at BU in using it.
‘The task of creating positive feedback for a colleague made me feel really happy myself.’
‘Super keen on more Lego to find collaborative creative solutions.’
‘The power of plastic bricks cannot be underestimated in unlocking you.’
‘I cannot believe how inclusive the process is.’
Whilst there are some that may chuckle at the concept of Lego® in education, it is worth noting that the presentation ‘Everything is Awesome!! Leisure, LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP), Mental Health and Wellbeing’ won best paper at the Leisure Studies Association 2022 Conference Falmouth, with further BU publications under review and in press.
Further resources
Lego, 2010. Introduction to Lego® Serious Play® [online] Available from:
https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/set/assets/blt8ec1d6ff766ddfd4/LEGO_SERIOUS_PLAY_OpenSource_14mb.pdf [Accessed 29 March 2023].
If you’re interested to know more, contact Dr Holly Henderson: hhenderson@bournemouth.ac.uk
