Teaching chemistry with LEGO (R) bricks

Teachers are developing unique teaching aids to attract students to the field of chemistry. Ideal teaching aids are tools that students can enjoy utilizing, reutilizing, and which can be constructed without employing special tools. LEGO (R)-based teaching aids satisfy all these requirements. Chemistry teachers have employed bricks to illustrate basic chemical concepts. Moreover, LEGO-based chemistry teaching aids have been vigorously reported by Campbell and coworkers since the late 1990s and are still being persistently reported by several groups. The focus of this review is the applications of LEGO bricks in teaching chemistry. This review describes LEGO-based teaching aids that are easily constructed and may be beneficial to readers, in terms of creating new teaching aids. Since LEGO bricks possess varieties of shapes and colors, they can be employed to design various teaching aids, including periodic tables, molecular models, polymer structure models, and frameworks for handmade measuring instruments. The polymeric structure models are generally difficult to build with typical ball-and-stick type molecular models; however, they can be easily built, employing LEGO bricks. The bricks are suitable for the construction of handmade measuring instruments because of their versatility and computer interface, as well as their non-requirement of special tools.