I get paid to play. I have very little to complain about.”

Christine “Tacos” Blandinos

PORTSMOUTH — They wore no hardhats or tool belts, but a group of third-graders at Hathaway School constructed a brick skyscraper last week before the winter break.

The seven-foot tower, made of Legos, also featured a cityscape that was built as part of a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) unit at the school. 

Christine “Tacos” Blandinos of TV’s “Lego Masters” was brought in as a guest instructor who taught students in grades 1 through 4 how to develop their engineering and creativity skills. She used a real-life local issue to drive home the importance of sound engineering and construction: the closing of the westbound side of the Washington Bridge in Providence on Dec. 11.

“Something as simple as having the bridge having issues was so real to them to be able to understand. If they don’t build it right, you’re going to have problems,” said Blandinos, a Warwick resident who competed in Season 3 of “Lego Masters” and now has her own business, Powered by Tacos.

“I teach engineering with Legos and do workshops and visit schools. I get paid to play. I have very little to complain about,” she joked.

Sarah Vitale, an instructional systems coach for the school district, worked with library media specialist Vanessa Dyer in writing grants so that students could have hands-on experiences in STEAM projects and coding in November and December. It’s all part of teaching foundational 21st century skills.

“We got a $2,500 grant which paid for our wonderful ‘Lego Master’ to come in. It also paid for POW! Science and for some of our supplies for art construction and some of the things we needed for the Dash robots. We’ve been doing a month and a half of STEAM activities, which has been super-cool,” Vitale said. “The Legos is part of our engineering project, but we did some science with POW! Science where they did fossils with dinosaur bones. We had a coder come in from AAA and the kids got to interview him about his job. We’ve been doing a lot of coding online, even in kindergarten. They’re getting exposure — ‘Hey, this is an opportunity for me and I could do this someday.’”

Last Thursday, third-graders gathered in the school library to hear from Blandino, who taught them about engineering and construction by using Legos, with which nearly all the students were familiar. She called the bumps on the bricks “studs,” and a “two-by-four” was a Lego brick with two rows of four studs.

“When I say, ‘Hey, grab a two-by-four, this is what I mean,” she told students before they started building the skyscraper. For each building floor, she encouraged students to build “extras” such as couches, chairs, even toilets.

The building also needed a city surrounding it, said Vitale, holding up a large, flat piece of green Lego. “You could make a park, you could make ducks in a pond — look at those blue pieces; that’s our water. You could also make roadways; there are lamps and different things you could put on that roadway to make it work. That is the city that we’re now going to be building,” she said.

Learning from mistakes

Blandino, who didn’t discover Legos until after college, used to teach pre-school before she went back to school for engineering. She sees a real parallel between real-life engineering and what young children can learn when working as a team to solve a problem.

“It’s a hands-on experience. It becomes tangible to them when they realize that something’s not clicking together. So here it’s just understanding the process. 

“When you make mistakes, the process is a little bit longer, but you learn from your mistakes,” she said.