2012 marked the 50th year of the LEGO brick in Australia.

This milestone was celebrated with ‘The Festival of Play’ – an integrated campaign set out to prove that LEGO is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago - a toy brand to inspire the ‘builders of tomorrow’.

The word LEGO comes from ‘leg godt’ - Danish for Play Well.

‘Playing well’ takes many forms – LEGO encourages collaboration, problem solving, and it improves cognitive skills.

But playing with LEGO also inspires the imagination. Where one kid might see a yellow LEGO brick as a banana, another might see a submarine. By inspiring the imagination, LEGO promotes creative thinking – just one of the many benefits of ‘playing well’.

As part of The Festival of Play, we needed an idea that brought this insight to life.

We did it with ‘PlayMaker’, an iPhone app that transformed any piece of brick into a game. Here’s how.

Using the phone’s camera, the user takes a photo of any LEGO piece.

PlayMaker then detects the shape and colour of the piece, and suggests how the piece could be imagined - the app might propose that that a long grey brick is actually a spaceship, or round orange piece, a crab.

The user can then play a game based on the apps suggestion. For example, if PlayMaker suggests a yellow piece is actually a submarine, an underwater world is drawn around the piece, and the user need to keep the submarine afloat!

There are 25 game ‘engines’ in total. To date, the app has been downloaded 1300 times.