Snap Circuits have been a longtime staple of STEM toys and are widely recognized as a great way for kids to learn about the complexities of electricity in a fun and low stress way. Elenco makes a lot of different Snap Circuit kits at various levels and they’re often a favorite for parents of kids that love to tinker. Most of the kits work with basic electricity or involve sounds, lights or flying rotors to give visual cues for when kids get an experiment right. Despite having a reputation for solid, fun learning toys they’ve finally outdone themselves with the Snap Circuits BRIC.
The Snap Circuits BRIC by itself is pretty cool, it contains 26 different projects that involve coupling Snap Circuits with Lego-like bricks! A lot of the experiments look similar to traditional Snap Circuits’ standard fare. You’ll find a lot of lights and some sounds, but where the BRIC steps the game up is in getting the circuits to interact with the “Legos”. You can use some of the building bricks with moving parts to get the circuits to activate and even power some of the actions in the “Legos”. You can see in the video linked previously where a marble is run through a setup of Legos and Brics to activate circuits and make use of an elevator (not pictured) to start the process anew.
This aspect of the Elenco BRIC gives it almost limitless potential as you can use Legos with the Elenco BRICs to design structures and simple machines. It’s a fairly new toy, having launched in November 2018, so there’s not a lot of stuff online about using this with Lego MOC. However, there is great potential to use the BRIC with Lego MOC cities, or other builds, perhaps with transit systems or various super hero sets. There's also some great options in pairing these with DIY light up Legos that use LEDs to illuminate bricks. Elenco also suggests the ability to use the BRIC to raise and lower a drawbridge, so the possibility exists that the BRIC would make a great team up with someone trying to make a huge Lego MOC build with electronics. You can even see some of the entries for the contest Elenco held last year. If you end up doing some, we’d love to see what you make on social media!
This potential and overall innovative aspect of this toy has not surprisingly led to the Elenco BRIC winning multiple awards in 2018 & 2019. Some of the awards it’s received are: Best Toys for Kids 2018 from ASTRA, 2018 National Parenting Product Awards, the 2018 Seriously Stem Award, the KAPi Awards (2019) and a few others. Given how innovative this toy is, connecting building blocks with the already cool Snap Circuits, it’s going be really interesting to see how Elenco develops new sets around this and how people use this toy with Lego and other building toys. The Elenco BRIC has a huge amount of potential and we hope to see some creative builds and look forward to bringing you new developments with this toy!