The LEGO Zoo: 50 Easy-to-Build Animals by Jody Padulano

The book goes through complete LEGO style instruction for building a veritable ark of animals, including a liting of parts (including LEGO part number) and step by step instructions.

The vast majority, probably all, of the pats used for these anmals are parts most LEGO builders will have laying around if you’ve built and stashed a dozen or more kits. There are a few specialized pieces like eyes, that you probably do have some form of. If you need to you can buy pieces st sources suggested in the book.

Helpfully, and as part of the focus on younger audiences, the author gives advice on how to sort and thus more usefully store your LEGO bricks, so you can more easily find the ones you need to build out-of-kit projects like those suggested here.

The book also includes a glossary of LEGO brick types, which is helpful.

This is a great gift for some kid you know, five and up, who has a big pile of LEGs and a Winter Break coming up!

Author Bio
Jody Padulano is an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) born and raised in Rome. Padulano is a computer engineer who divides his time between work and his true passion: LEGO! As an active member of Italian LEGO communities such as ItLug and RomaBrick, Padulano has exhibited his works throughout Italy and abroad.

It does take absolutely forever to build any of these projects, but there are stages along the way where you can stop and play with what you’ve got so far.

And, if you are clever, you can combine the Lego Boost parts that come with the kit with other Lego objects and make more different things. For example, if you happen to have the LEGO City Arctic Scout Truck (60194) , which is in and of itself a fun LEGO kit, you can combine some of the Boost parts with this kit to make something special. Like this:

But, the problem with that project, and several like it, is that even on the LEGO boost site, there is relatively little information on how to do it. Not that you necessarily want step by step instructions. You really want to learn how to hack the LEGOs with the Boost and have fun creating. But I think it is helpful to get a bit more guidance, to get farther with the first few stages of this sort of project.

And that is why Yoshihito Isogawa wrote The LEGO BOOST Idea Book: 95 Simple Robots and Hints for Making More!. This excellent book has, as it says in the name, 95 specific ideas that come in the form of typical LEGO non-verbal visual instructions (but nicer looking than actual LEGO instructions) to do very specific things, like how to make a sliding door, how to launch rockets, that sort of thing. Each project comes with the code blocks specified to make it work.

In a way, deploying many of the ideas in this book, and using them as part of an overall LEGO build you’ve otherwise got going, may be more fun than the Robot itself, especially after you’ve messed around with the robot for a few weeks.

For example, we have a large and complex LEGO Angry Birds Kit, which includes an angry bird launcher that uses basic finger power like a lever. Not any more! We are going to build an actual rocket launcher that launches the angry birds, you betcha!

Now, I want to be clear about something. All of the parts that the The LEGO BOOST Idea Book uses in its descriptions are part of the LEGO Boost kit itself (#17101). But the principles laid out and the design ideas could easily use other bricks from your general collection. This give you the best of both worlds: Total functionality using the book itself as an add on to your Boost, adding significant value to that expensive kit for only a few bucks more AND a way to leverage all those other books, because you can extend the projects pretty easily with your own imagination.

I guess I would say that if you get a LEGO Boost Kit, you really should get this book along with it. Great gift for a kid this holiday season. Best ready to build robot on the market (possibly) with a truly meaningful extension.