LEGO Group

The partnership between the Natural History Museum and the LEGO Group inspires children to learn about nature through play. We look to ignite their imagination by connecting them with nature, nurturing critical thinking skills and inspiring them to help protect our planet.

We’ve teamed up with the LEGO Group's Build the Change programme to offer free nature-focused educational activities for children at the Museum, inspired by our thought-provoking teachers’ course pack.

Through our family, schools, and community programmes, since summer 2023 we’ve invited children to unleash their creativity and imagination to help build solutions to the impacts of human activity on the planet – and on today’s dinosaurs, birds!

Thanks to our national partners, we’re delighted that these Build the Change activities are being tailored and delivered across the UK from summer 2024, continuing to inspire young people to connect with nature through play. These fun and engaging programmes are running at:

• Great North Museum: Hancock
• Leeds Museums
• National Cardiff Museum, Amgueddfa Cymru
• Natural History Museum, Tring
• Nottingham Museums
• Peterborough Museum and Gallery
• RSBP and Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow
• Touchstones Rochdale

We could not be more excited to partner with the LEGO Group once again. This time we’ve teamed up to produce a free teachers’ resource pack as part of the LEGO Group’s Build the Change Programme. The pack contains engaging Key Stage 2 lessons that allow pupils to explore the impact of human activity on the planet by using birds - the modern-day descendants of the dinosaurs - to put our effects on the environment in context. These lessons are designed to inspire pupils to come up with solutions to real-world challenges using whatever teachers have available in their classrooms.

Following the huge success of Mission to Mars and to celebrate the Museum's space season, we teamed up with the LEGO Group once again to engage even more audiences in space exploration. This time, we worked with LEGO Group designers to create four landscapes, each inspired by what science currently understands about exoplanets and moons.

In a mass build event, we challenged families and community groups to use their imagination and predict what life might look like in other parts of the galaxy. Participants were asked to select one offour landscapes and build their own LEGO® Life Forms, thinking about what adaptations they would need to be able to survive in those conditions. We even brought along some real Museum specimens to highlight the adaptations that living things have on Earth.

Over two weeks we were able to engage with almost 10,000 children and adults. We also managed to involve multiple families in exciting conversations about different planetary landscapes, and we were thrilled to see so many of them working together and making memories through learning.

Meet some of our participants' very own creations!

If you would like to learn more about adaptation and space exploration, have a go at creating your own LEGO Life Forms at home. We adapted LEGO Life Forms into a digital activity during the Museum's closure to ensure educational activities remained accessible for everyone at home.

To continue our exciting partnership, we turned to one of the Museum's most exciting research areas: space. Using our science and LEGO educational WeDo kits, we created an immersive and playful workshop where pupils are tasked with building, coding and launching their own rover to explore a realistic Martian landscape.

By integrating key aspects of the Design Technology, Computing and Science curriculum into this workshop, we created a fully immersive, engaging and fun learning through play activity.

Mission to Mars: LEGO® Explorers Workshop was hugely successful with fantastic feedback from students and teachers alike. It has since been adapted and implemented with family and adult audiences showcasing the versatility and importance of LEGO brick-inspired education for everyone. Find out how schools can book onto the workshop.

Our first co-created activity celebrated the launch of the LEGO Group’s new LEGO elements made from sustainably sourced sugar cane. This product represented the first step in the company's aim to use sustainable materials in all core products by 2030.

We created a three-day event at the Museum in August 2018 as part of a world-wide challenge, encouraging builders to create their own sustainable superhero inspired by hero character Plantus Maximus, and build a natural habitat fit for Plantus Maximus and his friends.

By combining the expertise of LEGO Play Agents and our own science educators, we created a range of inspiring experiences for builders of all ages to promote engagement with the natural world.

The events brought together the LEGO Group and the Museum's passions and brand values, and fulfilled our shared aim to empower the builders of tomorrow to love and care for the natural world.