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by aleksejs
14 days ago
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Buried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits: > One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete. My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces. This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software. |
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The kids particularly enjoyed the moments where you have to exchange subassemblies: "I need this from 'popcorn'!" "I need this from 'astronaut'".
When the kids got tired, subsequent steps were assigned to me as if nothing had happened. I am guessing there's a DAG of tasks (to build subassemblies), and the tasks just get picked up by individual participants.
10/10