A little while ago Chris Betcher posted how early in his classes he gets students to measure a selection of Lego bricks to build measuring skills. Inspired by this and the paper rulers you get in IKEA, I made this worksheet that I’m sharing. There is one metric and one in imperial… Oh and Lego feels like a little of both which is strange but there are reasons as to how this has occurred, some research will uncover those reasons.
You need to print directly from the file without any scaling and probably best not to photocopy them either, or the built-in rulers may get distorted.
This was at a stage where I had introduced the class to Onshape as our CAD software and needed them to start dimensioning and using constraints in their designs. I reqquired an object they could recreate using an accurate scale and I remembered Chris’s tweet about measuring Lego pieces. I gave each student this sheet, a pencil and the same 4×2 Lego brick, took them outside and had them hold the brick on the built-in grid/ruler and freehand draw it using the isometric grid including the dimensions they would need to recreate the same thing in our CAD software.
Finished 3D CAD files were printed with 3D printers, with the ultimate evidence of success being, do they connect and hold (clutch power) to official Lego bricks. I guess it’s a reverse engineering task. I have evolved the task to include four different Lego pieces that students attempt to measure and recreate.
The idea of having a self-contained worksheet developed a little from desperation. My usual students are not very well equipped, having no rulers, set squares, compasses, protractors or pencils. They have Chromebooks, which sadly the students don’t usually have a good grasp of how to use them. This combined with them being left at home, broken, flat or just generally a tool for distraction.
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