Educational Lego set for Statics

From left to right: LEGO beams, LEGO friction pins, custom made green sliding piece, custom made flexible piece, custom made base piece

project description

In my Inventive Design class, a team of three mechanical engineers and I were tasked with creating an educational LEGO set for teaching statics concepts to sophomore mechanical engineering students. We were allotted only ten pieces for our kit.

After a brainstorming session, my team settled on focusing on teaching three main concepts with our kit: trusses, bending, and hinged joints. We chose these topics because they were the most difficult for us when we had taken the class. We also consulted with other students who agreed that these topics would benefit from a physical model.

We got to work designing LEGO pieces. We decided to design three custom pieces, and include seven store-bought pieces. Our custom pieces each focused on a topic that we wanted to teach. There was a base piece that facilitated the easy creation of truss structures, a flexible piece that helped show bending and moments, and a sliding piece that helped show hinge motion.

We 3D printed the pieces on FDM and SLA 3D printers, and began to document use cases for our kit. Check out the GIFs below to see our use cases in action. Our classmates were particularly impressed with the flexible piece, and it became the talking point of our kit.

This assignment gave me valuable experience designing for a user, brainstorming in a project team, and working under tight constraints.