Customers are familiar with their neighborhood CITGO location, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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CITGO Petroleum Corporation announced its Fueling Good. Rebuilding Lives. Initiative today, which will contribute a percentage of CITGO gas station purchases at the pump to long-term recovery in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. For the next three months, 1 cent from every gallon of CITGO fuel purchased - up to $8 million - will be donated to qualified organizations that are helping local communities rebuild after the devastating impact of these natural disasters. CITGO Petroleum Corporation, an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A., announced today that it will donate up to 50,000 barrels of diesel to Puerto Rico.

2 — Build play in For a product to be truly sticky, it needs to be more than functional, connecting on an emotional level — to be a joy to use like, actually fun. Of course, this doesn’t mean throwing unnecessary animations in left, right and centre. The user’s path to completing a goal within the product should never be impeded by pointless fluff, but there are always novel ways to accomplish a task or fun elements can be embedded into the experience.

This is a key part of the LEGO philosophy; embed little surprising moments of play into everything. Although perhaps this isn’t surprising for a toy company. However, this approach is now being applied in markets where it wouldn’t have in the past — take the popular example of, which sits in the ever so lively enterprise communication space with other fun products like Lync and Yammer.

At the end of the day, any product will be used by real people, so building small moments of delight (what designer Oki Sato calls ) can be the difference between success or sighs. Some nice examples. Lower fidelity lowers the barrier to entry — everyone can try and anyone can succeed. There is no wrong way to connect simple plastic bricks, and no wrong way to tweet. It is a playground safe from failure.

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It is much in the same way that many are hesitant to draw in front of a group or are put off by the pressure of a blank page (just think about how often you hear the phrase: “but I can’t draw!”). Whilst drawing may offer more scope and depth, there also comes the perception that someone can miss the mark creating a subconscious barrier to entry. Less allows for more. Yep, I know I said 5 at the start. But sometimes you have to be prepared to change the plan or break the old structure when it no longer fits or works the given task. Sometimes you don’t know exactly what you are about to create or what the outcome will be, and that’s ok. Let the plan change.

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Larger-than-life LEGO vehicles take to the ancient streets of rome. For ‘LEGO outside LEGOLAND’, has digitally introduced a series of vehicles at a miniature scale into the everyday urban landscapes of italy.

A toy brick helicopter lands outside of the colosseum; a tram makes its way across a station; and a formula1 car is rolled out of a truck. ‘the aim is to transform ordinary contexts in extraordinary ones,’ franco says, ‘thus compelling the toys to get out of the idyllic and politically correct landscapes belonging to their perfect and idealistic cities, with the result of instilling in them those vices, virtues and desires typical of human beings.’. LEGO understands the importance of their following and the strategic role social media plays for the brand. Their Fans/Follower­s/Subscribers aren’t just a vanity metric, they help to strengthen their name, and are a powerful resource for their innovation strategy.

Fans are at the heart of what they do and where they’re going. LEGO’s social media strategy pays tribute to them and their worlds – after all, it’s about the memories they make from the stories they create with those plastic bricks. LEGO even launched in 2011 – a social bookmarking platform designed for members to share creations and that of other users they find around the web. We’re always thankful for input we receive from fans, children, and parents alike. We know the importance of this issue. We’re determined to leave a positive impact on our society & children. We’re saddened when the Lego brand is used as a tool in any dispute between organisations.

However, we fully expect Shell to live up to their responsibility & take appropriate action to any potential claims. It is important to us that any partnerships we have support our vision, promise, & has Lego play at the core. The ‘Paper’ category is next on our and it’s a doozy! One HUGE problem area in that category was storing my son’s LEGO manuals.

True, you can find most LEGO instructions online so technically you can probably get rid of the paper version, but it’s harder to build using online instructions plus you’re at the mercy of the internet to be able to find them. Previously, I stored them in a binder with plastic pockets that open at the top, but as you all predicted, they bunched up and dumped out the manuals whenever we moved the binder. CATASTROPHE to a sensitive 5-year-old.

Thankfully we solved the problem and now our LEGO manuals are super easy to use, plus I whipped up some snazzy free printable LEGO binder covers that you can download too! I am full-time father of two little boys, Senior Fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and I teach in Temple University's Intellectual Heritage Department. I speak internationally about edTech, game based learning, and 21st Century parenting.

I hold a PhD in Depth Psychology, specializing in Jungian/archetypal psychology and phenomenology/Heideggerian philosophy. In particular, I study the ways video games (and other new forms of interactive storytelling) teach us to make sense of the world. Email: jordosh@jordo.tv. From a business perspective, consider that the Lego Group has had jaw-dropping success lately—25.2% revenue increase last year (from around $4.34 billion in 2014 to $5.44 billion in 2015). That’s quite an achievement for a company that seemed to be right on the verge of collapse just over a decade ago.

Their 2003 annual report reads like a eulogy. But 12 years later, in 2015, they’re quick to point to “exceptional growth” even “on top of a particularly strong 2014 that was aided by the successful LEGO Movie.”.

Furthermore, the brand is beloved, both as nostalgic legacy artifact and as the toy market frontrunner at a time when the kids and play market is being colonized by tablets, smartphones and video game consoles. But Lego thrives in both the tangible and digital markets. They’ve got a boatload of successful role-playing video game titles and the new NFC-enabled Dimensions line. Somehow, they’ve sustained the popularity of a product that’s just about as physical as things get, even within in a virtual space. Of course, my best metric of what kids love to play has nothing to do with the market. It comes from observing my own children. And my eight-year-old son enjoys building with Lego bricks so much that he recently listed every under-utilized video game in his collection on eBay and used the cash to buy the newest Millennium Falcon set.

He then spent a week rushing home to assemble it each day after school. Now it joins his Dr. Who Lego Tardis andBack to the Future Lego DeLorean on epic imaginary adventures across our living room rug. Needless to say, each year in April, when I kiss him goodbye before heading off to Lego’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, he thinks I’m the coolest dad ever. This year, he was also just a little bit envious, wishing I’d take him along. No wonder; when I show him the Legoland Conference Center’s giant sculptures via our daily Skype video calls, or when he sees the snapshots of my colleagues and me huddled around tables, building with bricks, he imagines that my week away must be all about Lego products.

I’m there to attend the Lego Foundation’s annual Idea Conference. I’’ll go ahead and assume if you’r’e a regular reader of Spaceships and Laser Beams, you definitely have a house full of! I’’ve found some great ways to use LEGOs in learning that are sure to be a big hit. Your kids will be eager to learn using Math with LEGOs: Preschool Roll and Count; LEGO Math: Skip Counting; Using LEGO to Build Math Concepts; LEGO Math Worksheets; LEGO Math for Elementary School; and Hands-on Multiplication with LEGOs.

When they outgrow the Duplo blocks, there are some great learning toys you can turn them into: Multiplication Grouping with LEGOs; LEGO Geometry; LEGO Bar Charts; LEGO Challenge Math Activity; How to Teach Numbers with LEGOs; and Snapping Numbers – Composing and Decomposing Numbers. Not only are LEGOs great for math problems, but also check the Learning Patterns with LEGO, LEGOs Kindergarten Printables, Alphabet LEGO Cards, LEGO Solar System, Preschool Science – How Long Will a LEGO Boat Float?, DIY Spinny Spellers, and Classification and LEGOs. Your guys are going to love bringing history to life with Learning Classical Conversations History Sentences with LEGO! Little Big Art see LEGO® a little differently to most, not as little plastic bricks, but as art. From Warhol to Hirst; Mondrian to Emin, Little Big Art playfully realises these landmarks of art in LEGO®.

And when they’re done playing with the little bricks (and after having a nice cuppa) Little Big Art likes to sculpt human-size versions of individual bricks and tiles, and use these giant LEGO® pieces to create EVEN MORE ART! Putting you into the little plastic feet of a minifigure and giving you a fresh twist on the way you see LEGO®. Fractions always seem to trip up my students. Things get murky when we’re talking about different size “wholes” or when we switch from thinking about the fractions of one whole to fractions of a set. The only way to combat fraction-mayhem is to provide students with a LOT of opportunities to experience fractions with tangible objects. Pattern blocks are a popular fraction manipulative, but I like LEGO even more.

(Pattern blocks can only be broken down into sixths when using the hexagon as one-whole. LEGO blocks have many more possibilities!). When analyzing data, upper elementary students explore various ways to express the “central tendency” of their data set; that is, various ways to express the average.

When finding the mean (arithmetic average), students quickly learn to add all of the data and then divide the total by the number of data points. But very few students fully understand why they do this add-then-divide dance to find the mean. While evening out LEGO towers of varying heights, students have a first-hand experience of what “mean” means. That wasn’t the case. In miniature scale, it’s easy to gain perspective on how blocks fit together. At life-size scale, it gets more challenging. “People start to worry about stability,” he says.

It’s no big deal if your 3-inch wall topples, but it is a problem if your 15-foot wall does. The key is to take lessons from Lego, and stack the blocks like bricks, staggering them so a brick covers the seam of the two below it. Each block also has at least one channel that allows power cables, reinforcing wooden dowels, or LED strips to snake through as a means of illuminating or stabilizing larger structures.

Something about this piece with the iconic 1981 ad tapped the zeitgeist and it became one of HuffPo’s more viral articles in recent memory, receiving over 60,000 shares. And along the way, the small world of Facebook led to a comment thread on my wall where someone, upon seeing the little red-haired girl holding her LEGOs, wrote, “Hey, I know her!” And now I do too, because that’s the serendipity of social media. Her name is Rachel Giordano, she is 37 years old, and she’s a in Seattle, Washington.

Giordano agreed to talk to me about her childhood and the ad, and to pose for a new Then & Now photo meme, which you see above in the lead image. Children haven’t changed, but adults who market to them have What do we have to lose, besides stereotypes? So what did Rachel Giordano have to say about the LEGO news van when it pulled up to her medical office in Seattle via Amazon and UPS?

First things first: she told me what it was like to be a child model for the Ford Agency in New York City, posing for print ads and performing in commercials. On the day she went into the studio to make the 1981 LEGO ad, she was given a set of original LEGOs and an hour to play with them and make her own creation—it is what you see in the ad. (And those were her own clothes—the comfy jeans and blue striped t-shirt and sneakers without a hint of pink that she wore in off the street.). The news van kit struck her as really quite different. She does not have children, so the change in LEGOs represented by the Friends line was startling: “In 1981,” explains Giordano, “LEGOs were ‘Universal Building Sets’ and that’s exactly what they werefor boys and girls. Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package.

In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”. The original 1981 ad has been making the rounds in my girl empowerment blogging circles for the past few years now, symbolic of the nostalgia that ain’t what it used to be when it comes to children’s toys. The stereotyping of girls in their world of play is an issue close to my heart and one that I address in my book, because, as Maria Montessori notably said, play is the work of the child. Editor's Note: What most recent articles about this inspiring ad have left out, is the equally inspiring woman who created it. According to a January 21, 2014 piece, “The ‘What is Beautiful’ ad was created by Judy Lotas, who was the creative director at SSC&B, a now-defunct ad agency She had two young daughters at the time, and gender equality was a big topic.'

What’s the problem with girl LEGOs? Why is everyone against pink?, ask many parents. I’ll let Rachel Giordano answer that question: “Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. I know that how I played as a girl shaped who I am today. It contributed to me becoming a physician and inspired me to want to help others achieve health and wellness.

I co-own two in Seattle. Doctor kits used to be for all children, but now they are on the boys’ aisle. I simply believe that they should be marketed to all children again, and the same with LEGOs and other toys.”. Giordano has grown up, but she’s still the same cheerful and creative person you see in the original ad. As Yulo’s meme suggests, children haven’t changed, but adults who market to them have. They sure are different.

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How about this? Let’s give all children a world of play that includes all colors and all possibilities, and let’s market it that way. What do we have to lose, besides stereotypes? Gender-segmented toys may double corporate profits, but always seem to result in for-girls versions that are somehow just a little bit less. I say, let’s give girls more. Any reason not to??

About This Contributor. Name of Model: Created by: / Found at: and Details: In the early days of motion pictures, they didn't have film reels or real video technology. Early on, moving pictures were created by using series of still frames in a circle, with slits between each one. Looking through the slits at the image on the other side while the circle was spinning would make it look like the image was moving.

If you remember what blog you're reading, this next part shouldn't surprise you - here's a an example of a that works in this manner made out of LEGO. Much like the first example of this (based on a series of photographs taken by ), this particular ones animates a horse's gallop. About this model. Would have turned 183 years old today. Remember the Wombles?

Orinoco and Bungo and Madame Cholet. I like to call out, 'Coo-ee, Wumbles' sometimes, just like she does when tea's ready.

The book was published in 1973 and cost the grand sum of 35p. Those were the days. The Womble philosophy is more popular than ever now, although 'making good use of the things that they find, the things that the everyday folk leave behind' has fancier names now, repurposing, recycling, upcycling and the like. I found this book on the sofa, the middle boy is reading it, and I'm happy that he likes the gentler stories, as well as some of the more action-packed stuff he also reads.