It’s been a LEGO year
Anniversaries are always a nice time to celebrate and reflect. February marked one year of my relocation across the Atlantic to settle into Danish life and help bring creative play systems to children around the world. A colleague recently asked me how I ended up here. More subtly, if I had the dream of becoming a design manager at LEGO and worked the last 10-years of my career to get here. To be honest, I didn’t. I of course loved and played with LEGO bricks as a child, building elaborate nonsensical cities with my little brother. At that time, nor even 2-years ago, I can’t say I had a very clear career path to ultimately land at LEGO designing physical/digital play experiences.
I’m very happy here, and I can’t think of a better fit for me right now. I think it’s interesting to reflect that while I’ve had a career like many 30-somethings – non-linear, with a couple of impatient or impulsive jumps – I haven’t veered far from the core of what I get excited about (STEM). That’s what helps me land in a place where I unknowingly belonged. First of all, I launched into engineering. Then I veered into entrepreneurship. Now I like to think I’m blending a bit of both at LEGO. My non-linear experiences in STEM have given me a varied toolset to utilize in the innovation of digital/physical toys.
I created an Ele-Waiter…
Most job interviews ask you to evaluate your own strengths and weaknesses. Others will ask, how you see yourself bringing value to that company or role. My interview experience completely through me for a loop. The interview did lead me to my first job out of college working as a mechanical engineer for Disney Imagineering. I built a functioning mini-elevator to transport waiters from an underground kitchen up through the center of tables, for a puppet show in front of 12 Disney executives. I made the prototype completely out of LEGO, which is actually an excellent prototyping tool. Showing versus telling goes a long way, while there’s always a time and place, I strongly believe in a hands-on method to share your ideas, skills, or both.
STEM subjects are inherently about our physical environment around us, therefore let’s be more hands-on when talking STEM. Our ideas will be understood more quickly, while conversations will flow more naturally with something to talk about. Therefore, our creativity is further nurtured. Whether it’s a project in school, a presentation, an interview, a corporate meeting…let’s see if we can push the boundaries and show up with a tangible version of our ideas.
How the Ele-Waiter was created
Basically the mini-elevator used the RCX brick, which is the original Mindstorms mini computer. Also, it used a motor with gears to automatically lift a waiter puppet up through the center of donut shaped cardboard tables. I programmed the RCX with the original RoboLab graphical programming language that I used with kids in schools. The design process was quite a few trial and error of trying to find the right speed and gearing ratio. This was to ensure the mini elevator could lift the puppet to the right level without falling off on the cardboard stage of the marionette puppet show.
About Melissa:
Melissa is Senior Design Manager at Lego Group in Denmark. She launched, built, and sold iCreate to Educate, a K-12 educational software startup. She relocated from the US to Europe in 2015 to start a new Danish life and LEGO career. You can check find out more about Melissa Pickering on her blog site: http://www.melissapickering.com/
Dr. Koshi Dhingra has dedicated her career to STEM education and is passionate about having every child live up to their potential. Seeing a lack of girls and other underrepresented youth in STEM programs, she founded talkSTEM in 2015 to address the imbalance. She has a doctorate in science education from Teachers College, Columbia University, has years of experience teaching in graduate and undergraduate programs, and has held leadership roles in universities. She advises and collaborates with a broad range of educational institutions globally. Dr. Dhingra began her career teaching science in middle and high school in New York. She lives in Dallas, Texas with her husband, three children, and two dogs.
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