Lego Battle Spinners (Cool STEM Activity for Kids)

If you are like me, you kept all your interlocking toy bricks from when you were a kid.  And then when you had kids, they added to the collection. If you are very like me, then the only thing your children ever want for Christmas or Birthday is more bricks. And so your house is flush with the things.

After the novelty of following the instructions has worn off and the pristine sets have been destroyed (two days after acquisition), you are left with a veritable mess of toy bricks. Here are (some of) ours!

How do you put these bricks to good use while keeping your kids engaged in something creative and competitive? My five-year-old son came up with the answer. Seriously, this was entirely his idea.

Introducing, BRICK SPINNERS

The concept is simple and is inspired by a popular competition in which nerds with sponsors build robots that batter, bash, dice, slice, and set fire to one another inside of an arena.

Take your leftover bricks and build them into contraptions that can be manually spun like a top on a hard smooth surface. Crash them into each other, and one is guaranteed to explode or be knocked away. Kids love it, and selfishly, I find it pretty fun too.

At our home, we stage tournaments with our Brick Spinners™^{(ok not really)}.  My boys have gotten so into the sport that our stable now boasts around fifteen named Brick Spinners in four different weight classes: Adorable, Small, Medium, and Ridonkulus.

I will delve into the important anatomical aspects of a successful spinner in the next article, but there are three key features to point out that all Brick Spinners must contain:

1. A Spinney Thingy (a 2×2 round-bottom plate)
2. A Holdy-Thingy (these are technical terms, by the way)
3. Some Hitty-Thingies to whack the other spinners

The following photos are of our winningest Brick Spinner, which my sons named The Hammer, who competes in the medium class, most often against its archrival, SR-71.

To operate a Brick Spinner like The Hammer, one holds the Holdy-Thingy and twists the fingers and wrist to spin the Brick Spinner rapidly on its Spinny-Thingy.

Two Brick Spinners spinning rapidly may hit each other with their Hitty-Thingies, causing destruction. The least damaged Spinner, or the one that stays on the table, wins!

Granted, sometimes your kids spin the spinners and they never make contact. That can be remedied by giving them a little flick while spinning, or by using straws to blow them toward one another. Be aware, the straw technique takes practice – if you blow on the side counter to the direction of rotation, you will slow the spin!

2×2 round plates with rounded bottoms aren’t the most common pieces in the world, but if you have acquired massive numbers of toy bricks throughout the years, chances are you already have several of them in your collection. If not, however, there are several places on the internet where these pieces can be purchased individually. A quick internet search can find them. For example, Brick Owl (not sponsored!) was the first place I was able to easily locate these pieces. They have hundreds available for $0.01 or less, plus shipping. We have tried other methods of making the Spinny-Thingy, but these plates proved the best.

You now are armed with enough information to create your own Brick Spinners and battle your children for supremacy!

More Lego Spinners:

• Designing Lego Battle Spinners: Part 1 (The Basics)
• Designing Lego Battle Spinners: Part 2 (Using Physics!)