Breaking down (and building up) problem solving in contract law with LEGO®

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 present a series of LEGO-based educational games, in which students use playful, multi-sensory learning techniques and visual metaphors to conceptualise and construct legal concepts and analysis for problem questions in contract law. Students are tasked with LEGO activities across several workstations where they progress from modelling key concepts in contract law to extracting and colour-coding the analytical building blocks of legal advice to build, using LEGO bricks, an abstract model which represents its content, structure and logic. Those taking part demonstrated the successful consolidation and application of new and existing legal knowledge, while practising the professional legal skill of communication using accessible, non-textual means. We argue that the multi-sensory experience strengthens abstract, black letter, and text-based approaches to legal doctrines. We discuss the educational benefits of the approach and the way it contributes to developing professional and transferable skills. We conclude that the LEGO-based educational game offers a constructivist and experiential learning and teaching tool for problem solving that enables reflective practice, active participation, abstract conceptualisation, and has an important role in the 21st century context of legal education and professional legal practice. Playing with LEGO is also great fun.