Sure, LEGOs are great to play with, just for fun. But they can also be used to teach children real-world concepts in physics, engineering and architecture.

And that’s just what children taking “Engineering Fundamentals with LEGO” learned. That was the name of a camp they attended, Aug. 4-8, at the Vienna Community Center.

There were two, three-hour sessions a day, for ages 6-8 in the mornings and ages 7-11 in the afternoons. The instructor was Austin Lounds of San Francisco-based Play-Well TEKnologies, which is now both national and international.

“It’s an after-school, enrichment program that also offers summer camps demonstrating engineering fundamentals and properties with LEGOs,” he explained. Why LEGOs? “Because they’re so easy to put together and take apart,” said Lounds. “The kids already love them and the parents know what they are.”

The children started each session with free play “to get their creative minds working and build whatever they wanted,” said Lounds. “Then I had a project that I already built. I showed them what it does and the engineering concepts behind it, and I also told them its real-world use.”

For example, he said, “On Wednesday [Aug. 4], we built airplanes, using a pull-back motor which – as it’s wound – stores potential energy in its spring. Then once you let it go, it changes into kinetic energy which allows it to move forward.

“We also went over the four forces of flight – gravity, which pulls a plane down; lift, which pulls it up; drag, which slows it down; and thrust, which propels it forward,” continued Lounds. “I’m trying to convey concepts like this so that, when children see the real thing, they’ll understand a little more about how it works.”

THE FIRST DAY OF CAMP, Aug. 6, the children built cars to demonstrate the difference between speed and torque. Explaining speed, Lounds said, “When a large gear drives a smaller gear, the axle spins faster than the motor can turn. But torque is the opposite, when a small gear drives a larger one. Although it’s slower, it’s stronger because it has a lower gear ratio.”

Now, he said, his students will know why particular vehicles move the way they do and are able to carry out certain tasks. “For example, “When they see a dump truck, they’ll know it’s using torque,” said Lounds. “And when they put their bicycle in a low gear to help get up a hill, they’ll realize that their feet are moving faster and their bike is moving slower, but it’s much easier to pedal. Hopefully, knowing about these engineering concepts will spark their interest in the field.”

On the camp’s last day, Aug. 8, the children played a game called Battletrack, similar to jousting, except with vehicles. Two opponents try to knock each other off a line of track made from LEGO bricks and rack, or flat, gears.

“These rack gears transfer circular motion to linear motion which allows the LEGO cars to go forward and backwards,” said Lounds. “And the kids modify their cars, either for defense or offense, by adding ramps, weapons and wedges.”

During the week-long camp, the children used more than 100,000 pieces of LEGO. “Play-Well TEKnologies provided $12,000 worth of LEGOs, but the kids don’t get to keep them,” said Lounds. “We want them to understand that struggling through a problem and coming up with the solution is the fun part of building something.”

Daniel Potorac, 8, who attends Dominion Christian School in Oakton, named his vehicle Dog. “I like LEGOs because I like building,” he said. “At this camp, I learned how to make a car and just need a remote control to make it at my house. It was fun because we got to make cool things. My favorite was the Battletrack vehicles because the other things [we made] weren’t as fast and strong as these are.”

Jacob Peel, 8 1/2, of Vienna’s Freedom Hill Elementary, also liked Battletrack best “because I like to battle” and named his car Monster. “Each vehicle starts at opposite ends of the track and tries to knock the other one off,” he said. “If you win three times, you get a mini figure as a prize.”

However, Stenwood Elementary third-grader Christopher Paine, 8, enjoyed making an elevator most of all. “I love buttons and building things that go up and down,” he explained.

Freedom Hill second-grader Carlos Sanchez-Zapata, 7, liked Battletrack because “it’s more like war.” Juan Jerez, 8 1/2, agreed, saying the Battletrack vehicles were “really easy to build, and it’s fun to battle with your friends.”

At the camp, said Juan, a third-grader at Our Lady of Good Counsel in Vienna, “I learned that you can do a lot of stuff with LEGOS and learned about motors and gears. I’d recommend it to others because it’s a fun camp and it’s fun to build LEGO cars with motors so they can drive. It’s really cool.”

A FOURTH-GRADER at the same school, Rebecca Roby, 9, was one of just three girls out of the 24 children attending the camp’s afternoon session. “I’ve been building with LEGOs since I was 5 and it’s fun,” she said. “When you finish making something, you’re really proud of yourself because, if it’s hard, it’s really cool to do. And it’s fun to do it with friends and family.”

Glad that she took this camp, Rebecca said, “I learned how to connect wires together and how gears mesh to turn the vehicles. I liked the machines we got to build, especially the elevator. It was advanced and it had rack gears, which I’d never seen before. And I’d never seen a moving elevator without the walls.”