How much Lego would you need to build your own house? A company made an online calculator to figure that out. You type in your house square-foot area and the number of floors…and it calculates how many 8-peg bricks you’ll need! A Lego brick is about 1/4 inch thick/tall, 5/8 inch wide, and 1 1/4 in long. Meanwhile, a *real* clay brick is 2 1/4 x 4 x 8 inches. So you need 9 x 6.4 x 6.4 Lego bricks for each real one, or about 367. The real question is, can we also build a working toilet?
Wee ones: A Lego brick is shaped like a box. How many faces (flat sides) does it have? Find a box and count them up!
Little kids: If you start building your bedroom wall with 2 red bricks, 2 yellow, 2 blue, 2 green and 2 white, how many bricks is that? Bonus: If you put 2 8-peg Lego bricks next to each other, how many pegs do you have in total – and how many ways can you place the 2 bricks so pegs line up? (Assume they’re the same color.)
Big kids: The square foot area of a space is the length times the width. If your bedroom is 10 feet long by 9 feet wide, how many square feet do you have? Bonus: If the two long walls in that 10-million brick house each have 1 million more bricks than each of the 2 short walls, how many bricks are in each wall?
The sky’s the limit: If your bedroom covers 20 square feet, what are all the combos of lengths and widths that it could be (using only whole numbers) — and which combo would need the most length of wall?
Answers:
Wee ones: 6 faces – remember to count the top and bottom along with the 4 side faces!
Little kids: 10 bricks. Bonus: 16 pegs. There are 5 ways to line them up: side by side in a square, end to end in a line, a T (one pointing to middle of the other), and 2 ways to make an L.
Big kids: 90 square feet. Bonus: 3 million bricks in each long wall, and 2 million in each short wall. Each long and short together use half the bricks – 5 million – and then you need 2 numbers 1 million apart that add to 5 million.
The sky’s the limit: 3 combos: 1 foot by 20 feet, 2 by 10, and 4 by 5. The 1 by 20 will need 42 feet of wall (20 + 20+ 1+ 1), while the 4 by 5 needs only 18 feet (5 + 5 + 4 + 4). The proportions of the space makes a huge difference!
