Try this simple and fun Valentine’s Day engineering challenge with your kids. Can they build a LEGO heart? It sounds easy, but it’s brain-stretching!
My kids love making things with LEGOs as part of our STEM activities. But after they stop building the original designs, they sometimes have a hard time figuring out what to make with the pieces.
For one of our Valentines STEM activities, I thought it would be fun to give them a LEGO building challenge as a fun Valentine’s Day themed engineering activity for kids. I challenged them to make LEGO hearts!
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Valentine’s Day Engineering Challenge: Build a Lego Heart
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LEGO hearts are a fun way to challenge engineering skills, problem solving, creativity, and spacial awareness! Kids of all ages will enjoy this fun challenge.
What you’ll need to build LEGO hearts:
- 6 2X4 bricks (we found ours in the classic creative set)
- 5 2X2 bricks (we found ours in the classic creative set)
- Other LEGOs (if you want to make hearts several different ways)
For this challenge, I supplied my kids with some standard LEGO blocks and simply challenged them to build hearts.
There were no directions outside of these. They had to use LEGO blocks, they had to make a heart shape. That was it!
It was a lot of fun to watch them try to create hearts from LEGO bricks. The biggest challenge in this engineering challenge is that hearts have round edges, while LEGOs have square edges. It took the kids a while to figure out how to mimic the rounded design with square bricks.
The kids tried building their hearts in a variety of ways, but in the end, Monkey found a design that she loved.
She stacked one 2X4 brick on top of a 2X2 brick. She stacked two more sets of 2X4 bricks on top of that centering them over the brick. Layer 5 had 1 2X4 brick placed in the center with two 2X2 bricks on either side. two 2X2 bricks were placed along the LEGO seams to complete the heart shape.
It is a simple design, but it took my kids a while to come up with this one.
For even greater challenge, try challenging kids to come up with multiple heart designs using different kinds of bricks. You can play for an hour or more strengthening those engineering skills!
