via firstlegoleague.org Last year, at a farmer’s market, I was surprised to find a robotics team nestled in between the local fruits and veg. I watched as the young people running the booth let kids come up and control a mobile robot that was sucking up large foam rings and then shooting them at a target. The booth was run by a team of teenagers from the local high school, and they had designed, coded, and built the robot for something called the First Robotics Competition. Each year, the parent organization issues a series of challenges and rules for the playing fields and robots that the team will build. The teams then, in their own home shop, build a robot designed to complete those challenges as quickly as possible. They then meet in a series of regional events and progress to national competitions. Winners are based on the number of challenges...

When LEGO announced the new Botanicals sets 10372 Hibiscus and 10373 Mini Bonsai Trees, my first thought wasn’t that they would be just “botanical display sets.” It was more like, “This is a minifigure-scale tree battle pack!” Why do Star Wars fans get all the fun with their endless parade of “battle packs” to build armies with? As a fantasy and foliage builder, trees are my armies. And for those who need to populate a bunch of trees quickly in a MOC, set, or city, these new botanical sets appeared to bring the good stuff. So when I received this wave of botanicals from LEGO, I was eager to find out how well they’d work. The truth is, trees have gotten short shrift in LEGO sets from the earliest days to today. A few rare examples have a reasonable amount of detail. And with the explosion of new foliage elements, trees...

Have you noticed a strange influx of Middle Earth builds the last few summers? That’s no coincidence. This summer marked the fourth year of the revived Middle Earth LEGO Olympics (or MELO for short). And this year, we decided to go even bigger than ever! Thanks to bricknerd’s own Jordan Jivkov (aka Dan Ko) for designing the logo! What is MELO, you ask? For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Middle Earth LEGO Olympics, the annual contest got its start on MOCpages, a now-defunct social media site devoted to the LEGO hobby and MOCing community. It was held annually there for several years, coming to an end in 2017. After that, the contest remained dormant until 2022 when LOTRLUG held a revised version of the contest. The contest follows a tournament setup where builders face off against each other in a series of rounds, each with a unique Middle...

It’s been a few days since our last LEGO Ideas update and surprisingly, there was only two projects that have been added to the list. Here we have another Gorillaz project to reach the Second 2025 Review Stage as well as an original idea with a 3D painting. We’re now down to roughly about three days left to qualify and the current count is at 144. Gorillaz – Flying Windmill Island – Shirbler The Owl: 3D Painting – Nannan Z The post LEGO Ideas August 207 Update – Few Days Left to Qualify appeared first on The Brick Fan. Original linkOriginal author: Allen "Tormentalous" Tran

Yesterday was the officially reveal of the LEGO Icons Captain Jack Sparrow’s Pirate Ship (10365) and one of the main questions about it was why is it not named the Black Pearl. Obviously it was the name given in the movies and even the first movie of the franchise was called Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl but why did LEGO not go with that name? Commenting as a response to a question on Instagram, LEGO gave a very brief and corporate response: The name reflects an internal creative decision by the LEGO Group and The Walt Disney Company. The answer doesn’t really give an actual explanation of why the set isn’t named the Black Pearl but raises more questions. Does the words “Black Pearl” have some bad meaning to it? I belive this is more on the Disney side of things similar to what happened with...