LEGO Competition Offers Free Legos to Creative Education Contestants (including Homeschoolers)

The LEGO Corporation is running its 2011 LEGO Smart Creativity Contest for K-12 educators living in the United States.  It is open to teachers in public, private, or home-based schools.

To enter the competition, teachers must create a video that is no longer than 150 seconds (2 and 1/2 minutes) that demonstrates how they have used LEGO products in an educational way.  However, the focus is on creativity, so the company isn't looking for a dry, academic explanation of a LEGO-based lesson plan.  Instead, they encourage skits, songs, rapping, stop-motion animation, or other fun ways to excite fellow educators about using LEGO in the classroom (even if the classroom is your kitchen table)!

Winners in five categories:  Public/Private Schools K-2, 3-5, 5-8, 9-12, and Homeschools, will each receive LEGO Education gift certificates worth $2,500, with one grant prize winner receiving a $5,000 gift certificate.  All winners will also get an expense-paid trip to the LEGO Education Summit on November 16, 2011.

However, if you are an early applicant, you may get a prize just for participating!  The first 8,000 public and private school entries, and the first 2,000 homeschool ones, will receive a FREE LEGO Smart Kit.  So it is best to get your contest video in as soon as possible.  The deadline for the competition is October 14, 2011.

For more information, or to access the complete rules and registration materials, visit the 2011 LEGO Smart Creativity Contest homepage.

Good luck to all competitors.  Let us know if you win!

Does Your Child Want to Work at Lego?

Or the Cartoon Network?  How about Google?  Or even the Disney Store?

Middle school is a great time for students to start thinking about what careers or companies they might want to pursue later on.  One of my friends runs a Career Exploration coop, where families arrange field trips to all sorts of different workplaces to expose young people to interesting occupations beyond simply "doctor," "lawyer," "computer programmer."

In that vein, I wanted to share this link to the 10 most eye-catching workplaces on the planet.  Check them out; these places are really, really cool.  But I wonder if it is a chicken or the egg sort of thing....are the companies so successful because their environments are so creative, or are the environments so creative because their companies are so successful?  Whichever it is, it could inspire your child to really get outside the box in envisioning her or his ideal workplace.

I think the link above also goes well with the Sukkah City post I had last week.  Both are examples of completely rethinking our living or working spaces.