Building Bridges

An engineer, a supplier and a builder walk into a room, and they’re all kids. It’s not an anecdote, it’s the way every Brick Club starts. In 2024 the Center for Transformational Play (CTP), which is part of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, partnered with Play Included®, a British organization offering LEGO® based therapy training, to bring Brick Clubs to schools and community organizations in the U.S.

The primary goal of Brick Clubs is to build social and emotional skills through collaborative play. Beyond that, the CTP has explored using Brick Clubs to gather kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds to work together. Research has shown that cross-class friendships are associated with upward mobility for less resourced kids, and the team from the CTP is partnering with other researchers to study the social connections made through Brick Clubs, thanks to funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

The clubs typically rely on a 12- to 14-week curriculum called Brick-by-Brick® to teach kids social and emotional skills such as shared attention, communication and teamwork, by building LEGO® models collaboratively. For each activity, a team of three kids are each assigned a role, such as the builder, the supplier and the engineer. By switching between these roles, kids remain social, interactive, and engaged, and they experience joy in the iterative building process. At the end, the group has built something they can be proud of.

“The thing that has been especially meaningful to me is that kids who feel like outsiders in school feel like Brick Club is a place where they can belong,” said Jessica Hammer, director of the CTP.

The CTP established a platform called Project Baseplate to grow Brick Clubs in the U.S. Through Project Baseplate, 125 facilitators had already been trained and started more than 40 clubs by the end of 2024. Some facilitators lead multiple clubs, and each club can range in size from four to 20 kids, depending on factors such as when and where the club meets. Each club can operate very differently depending on its context. The CTP team is tracking the ways those options — such as whether the club is open or closed or what its facilitator to student ratio is — change how a group operates effectively, and then they can recommend ways new facilitators can work within their clubs’ unique contexts.

As in LEGO®, a baseplate is a large flat piece that different structures can build on.

The Brick Clubs started in western Pennsylvania schools and community organizations, such as UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital and Assemble, an after-school community space for arts and technology education. The vision is for growth through a regional hub-and-spokes model across the U.S. Each region will be led by a hosting organization that can support the Brick Clubs in that region and can offer in-person training where trainers learn and play together. The CTP hopes to have 1,000 sites hosting Brick Clubs by 2027.

“When we originally set that goal, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s super ambitious; I don’t know how we’re going to do that,’” said Hammer. “But actually the problem that we’re having is staffing up for the amount of interest that we’re getting, which is the best kind of problem to have.”

The CTP is also exploring ways to supplement Brick Clubs with innovative digital experiences, so this spring they tried two new options. In the first, Carnegie Mellon students used the professional game development platform Unreal Engine to design Islands in the LEGO® Fortnite video game and explore empathy building between neurodivergent youth. The second was a tech demo that experimented with mixed-reality devices, exploring ways students could build models collaboratively using XR headsets and tablets for passthrough cameras alongside physical LEGO® bricks.

The CTP expects to continue offering Brick Clubs to more people, potentially including age groups beyond the K-12 student population. Additionally, it can use the Project Baseplate platform to offer other playful learning interventions to its partners across the U.S.

The Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach provided the initial funding for Project Baseplate. The Benedum Foundation, The Grable Foundation, and David L. and Noelle C. Conover of Matt’s Maker Space have also supported Brick-by-Brick®.