Engineering legal knowledge in contract law with LEGO®

Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation

Description

Using LEGO® in education has been shown to unlock creativity and facilitate the creation of lateral connections between ideas and concepts. In this paper, we report on our experimental working game with LEGO, in which students use playful multi-sensory learning techniques and visual metaphors to conceptualise and construct legal analysis for problem questions in contract law. Students are tasked with extracting and colour-coding the analytical building blocks of legal advice and to build, using LEGO bricks, an abstract model which represents its content, structure and logic. Those taking part demonstrated the successful acquisition and application of legal knowledge, while practising the professional legal skill of communicating using accessible, non-textual means. The process of compartmentalising and the (re)construction of legal information encourages students to become ‘engineers’ of contract law doctrine and argument, possessing the requisite confidence and skill set to produce complex legal structures. The activity also teaches methods of simplifying terms and explaining liabilities using visual tools in consumer as well as commercial contracts. We argue that the multi-sensory experience strengthens abstract, black letter, and text-based approaches to legal doctrines which provides an alternative avenue for students with diverse or more visual learning styles. We propose that the LEGO-based working game offers a constructivist learning and teaching tool for problem solving that enables reflective practice and experiential learning, and has an important role in the 21st century context of legal education and professional legal practice. Playing with LEGO is also great fun.
Period12 Sept 2024
Event titleNew Trends in Teaching Contract Law
Event typeConference
LocationBrighton, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • LEGO®
  • visual metaphor
  • playful learning
  • contract law
  • problem solving
  • knowledge engineering

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