Program the Brick Into the Computer Age

““LEGO’s core idea was thinning out. LEGO had become a sausage machine, looking at prices, at blocks in buckets for $4.99 each. Kjeld wanted something different, but marketing analysts said there was no market for computers in bricks. He couldn’t get his ideas through; they didn’t want to make it. So he asked me if I wanted to do it. I wanted to.” At Kjeld Kirk’s direct request, LEGO Dacta developed a prototype of an IT-controlled LEGO robot that could be programmed to follow a line on the table. After the presentation of the prototype to management, Kjeld Kirk said with great satisfaction: “That is the strongest expression of LEGO’s values for the next 20-30 years.” The combination of construction toys and IT programming expanded the possibilities for creating with LEGO and was a direct continuation of LEGO’s fundamental idea. Two years later, LEGO Mindstorms was launched as a bid for LEGO in the computer age. The “smart” bricks meant that children could now use LEGO to construct behavior or intelligence. In the next ten years, over one billion kroner worth of Mindstorms kits were sold.”

“Kjeld Kirk had managed nearly to tenfold LEGO’s revenue without abandoning LEGO’s core idea. Under his leadership, the company expanded the range of LEGO products, while delving even deeper into the product idea itself, among other things by collaborating with psychologists and experts in children’s play. For example, in 1989, Seymour Papert was appointed LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and LEGO Futura—the LEGO development division—opened an office near MIT. Papert had developed an educational theory he called “constructionism.” According to the theory, learning is particularly successful when children are engaged in constructing something they enjoy making, such as a sandcastle, a poem, a machine, a story, a computer program, or a song. Equally importantly, Papert collaborated with LEGO on a programming language that allowed children to control the things they built with LEGO elements and program them to move and respond to, for example, light. The personal computer had made its way into homes, and with it came computer games, which increasingly captured children’s playtime. For Kjeld Kirk, it became crucial for LEGO to take a new evolutionary step. His father had moved LEGO from wood to plastic. Now Kjeld Kirk saw it as his task to elevate LEGO from physical building blocks to digital bytes. The question was just how.”