Building Reproducible Research with LEGO Bricks

Join this Love Data Week event to play a game using LEGO bricks whlie building research skills! The game draws parallels between documenting and communicating the research process and recording and the creation of a LEGO model.

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February 12, 2026, 11:00am - 12:00pm
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Research Data and Digital Scholarship Exchange (RDDSx), Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, First Floor
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Open to Penn Students, Faculty, and Staff

Build your research skills while playing with LEGO materials! This fun and interactive game uses LEGO bricks to help participants explore what to document to make their research more reproducible. Small teams will work together to build a LEGO vehicle and documenting the process according to their given instructions. Once they have finished building their model, another team will try to recreate the vehicle with only the documentation that had been created. This game draws multiple parallels between documenting and communicating the research process and recording and the creation of a LEGO model. Insufficient metadata is an area that is relatively straightforward to identify and improve once researchers are aware of the need.

We will: 
- review the formats of metadata recording/documentation and their various benefits
- discuss the importance of good quality instructions play on research success 
- build with LEGO materials

This workshop is appropriate for all levels of experience working with research. This session is discipline agnostic.

This event is a part of Love Data Week, an annual celebration of data during the week of Valentine's Day.

Image Credit: Donaldson, M., and Mahon, M. 2020. Lego: Metadata for Reproducibility. https://doi.org/10.36399/gla.pubs.196477

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