🧱 LEGO City Race Challenge
Building Social Skills Brick by Brick
The LEGO® City Race Challenge game was structured to support diverse play preferences and transformations in:
Relationships: Encouraging empathy, active listening, and shared decision-making.
Skills: Fostering creative problem-solving, time management, and improvisation.
Attitudes: Promoting resilience, curiosity, and a growth mindset.
Knowledge: Introducing basic engineering and spatial reasoning through city and race car design.
From Prescribed Roles to Emergent Leadership
The Problem: Initial role assignments (Performance Analyst, Spotter, Technician) felt restrictive.
Players either ignored them entirely or became locked into rigid hierarchies that stifled natural collaboration.
The Design Decision
Before
After
This applies Embedded Design (Kaufman & Flanagan, 2015) in action.
By removing labels like "You are the Performance Analyst" and instead presenting a card that asks "What should we focus on next?", the learning goal (strategic communication) becomes obfuscated into natural play.
Players organically step into leadership moments based on the situation, building confidence and communication skills without performing assigned roles.
Rigid hierarchy → fluid collaboration and shared leadership. Players learned that leadership isn't about titles—it's about recognizing what the team needs in the moment.
In early tests, players ignored role cards entirely or argued about who "should" do what. After removing roles, one playtester naturally said "I'll grab the next pit stop card" without prompting—leadership emerged based on who was available, not who was assigned.
The Problem: Players struggled to understand when and why to pause building for "strategy cards." The mechanic felt arbitrary and interrupted flow.
The Design Decision
I rebranded "strategy cards" as "pit stops" (7 minutes each) and threaded racing language throughout the game.
Each card uses racing imagery: speedometer for Performance Analysis, binoculars for Spotter, gears for Technician.
Why Cognitive Scaffolding Works
Cognitive Load Theory (Fath et al., 2022) guided this choice.
Instead of remembering abstract timing rules, players understand "we're racing, so we stop at pit stops"—a familiar mental model.
The 7-minute duration becomes intuitive (quick pit stop) rather than arbitrary. Thematic coherence at every touchpoint (card names, icons, language) reduces cognitive load, making the game accessible for diverse learners.
The Small Detail That Matters
Even the card header "Pit Stop (7 min.)" eliminates the need to constantly check instructions—the information lives where players need it.
The Problem: "Hot Seat" cards (where players shared personal stories when pieces fell) failed completely.
They felt forced, interrupted building flow, and made players uncomfortable.
The Design Decision
I moved these questions to the backs of City Cards as optional building prompts.
For Underground City: "What is your ideal secret hideout?" For Arctic Research City: "How will you celebrate the sun's return after months of polar night?"
Before
After
Why Gender-Informed Design Works
Gender-inclusive design research (Kinzie & Joseph, 2008) shows middle schoolers benefit from multiple entry points.
These questions work as both creative storytelling prompts (often preferred by girls) and strategic design constraints—"How will you access food?" becomes an engineering problem (often preferred by boys).
Because they're optional rather than mandatory, players of all gender identities can engage at their comfort level during this critical period of identity development.
Another might focus purely on structure: "We need reinforced walls to prevent cave-ins." Both approaches are valid; both transform the player.
The Insight
Failure taught me that social-emotional learning shouldn't be a separate "stop and share feelings" moment.
It works best when woven seamlessly into creative problem-solving.
The Design Decision
One pit stop card requires each active player to close their eyes while building, guided verbally by teammates for 7 minutes.
Before
After
Why Constraints Work
This single mechanic addresses multiple transformation goals from Culyba's (2018) Transformational Game Design framework simultaneously:
Relationships: Forces active listening, clear communication, and empathy ("How do I describe what this piece looks like to someone who can't see it?")
Skills: Develops spatial reasoning through language, giving/receiving instructions
Attitudes: Players discover that limitations enhance creativity rather than restrict it—a core principle of design thinking
The Counterintuitive Discovery
Playtesting revealed that adding constraints actually helped players make better decisions.
One playtester said, "I couldn't see what I was doing, so I had to really listen and trust my team."
This contradicts the common assumption that social-emotional learning requires completely open-ended, rule-free environments.
Strategic constraints create dependencies that force the exact skills we want to build.
Framework Connection
I initially had "Non-Verbal Communication" where players couldn't talk at all—but this completely blocked communication rather than enhancing it.
"No-Peek Build" creates dependency on clear verbal communication, which is the actual transformation goal.
This is embedded design: the constraint naturally produces the learning outcome.
🧩 From Disjointed Mechanics to Cohesive Narrative
🤝 From Rigid Roles to Natural Leadership
The final game includes:
City Cards with environmental challenges and reflective prompts.
Examples: Underground City, Arctic Research City, Desert Oasis City—each with 3 guiding questions on the back
Pit Stop Cards (Strategy Cards) that introduce timed constraints and encourage team discussion
No-Peek Build: Eyes closed, verbal guidance only
Performance Analysis: "What should we focus on next?"
Spotter: "Is there anything we've overlooked?"
Technician: "Are there unstable parts or unused pieces?"
Three-Part Structure integrating freestyle building, strategic racing, and collaborative storytelling
City Building (20 min) - Open-ended creative exploration
Race Car Building (20 min) - Strategic design with pit stop challenges
Integration (5 min) - Test car in city, tell the story
Adding constraints and removing rules actually helped players make better decisions rather than limiting them.
In the final playtest, one group became so invested in their collaborative creation that they took photos before deconstructing—they'd formed emotional attachment to something they built together through shared leadership. This is exactly the "pride and belonging" outcome LEGO sought.
Gender-inclusive design isn't about separate experiences—it's about layered entry points.
LEGO artifact taken from a playster
I'm very proud that my design was selected and commissioned to be distributed at LEGO® Brick Clubs around Allegheny County! Its adoption by middle schoolers in educational settings highlights both the transformational design and the client’s confidence in its effectiveness.
Design grounded in research creates real change. Middle schoolers don't want to be taught collaboration—they want to race cars through cities they built together.
By embedding educational goals into joyful, inclusive play, the LEGO® City Race Challenge has become a meaningful tool for middle schoolers to connect, create, and grow —brick by brick.