Full of creativity, colour, fun problem-solving, and of course our very own Primary School Chaplain, Josh Taylor, this season of Lego Masters Australia has been extremely popular at Cedar College.

Josh’s LEGO skills have made their way into the Primary School Chapel videos this term, and there’s even the opportunity to win Josh and Trent’s “Bull Rider” by entering the competition on the LEGO Masters AU Facebook page!

After their recent underwater build, Josh and Trent have headed into Finals Week, and all Cedar eyes will be glue to their screens to see just how far they can go.

A Cedar Exclusive

This week, we’ve managed to secure an exclusive interview with Josh, to find out more about what it takes to be a LEGO Master.

Josh, we’ve been watching you come up with some amazing winning creations on LEGO Masters. How do you come up with the ideas for your builds, and have you ever been worried that your ideas wouldn’t work?

What you see on TV obviously has been edited so that only snippets of what actually happens make it to air. For nearly every single build, Trent and I had committed to one idea for sometimes as long as a full hour before we changed tactics. We knew the idea wouldn’t work if we weren’t enjoying ourselves or we couldn’t think of an easy way to engineer the idea. The ones that we were most successful at were the ones we were having a lot of fun and knew it would meet the brief if we could pull it off. We always began the process writing down our ideas and brainstorming until we both landed on something we were excited about creating. For our style of building, we wanted to make sure it pushed our ability, it was fun, and we would be able to divide up the tasks according to our strengths.

Some of your builds go for 14 or more hours. We assume you get some breaks, but do you get exhausted working with LEGO for that amount of time?

We do get breaks, for sure, and we are well looked after! Some builds even happen over multiple days. In saying that, there were some pretty long days and you can be building for quite a few hours before you get to stop. This definitely takes its toll as you can go a bit “brain dead” working on the same thing for too long. A good tactic that we used, if we were getting frustrated or tired with one thing, was to put it down and do something else and then come back to it later, which really helped.

It seems that a big part of the show is using LEGO in unusual ways, and thinking outside the box. What are some skills that students can develop through LEGO?

LEGO is such a great tool to teach us lots of things! Building on the show really pushed us to think creatively and to use the bits in weird and wonderful ways, and it pushed us to think with an engineering mindset. Building with LEGO at home does this too! If you set yourself a challenge with LEGO (or copy one from the show), you will see that you have to use a lot of different parts of your brain! What’s your idea? – creativity. How are you going to achieve it? – problem solving. What if you don’t have the pieces you want? – resourcefulness. Now try and do it with a friend or family member – teamwork!

Finally, now that you’re a LEGO celebrity, what things can we expect to see you doing around the Cedar College campus, and with the Primary School classes this year? 

Since LEGO has become a bit of a craze now, especially because the students are excited to see me on the show, it makes sense to use it within my role. It’s a great way to connect with students in class or one-on-one, which is always a big part of my role. We have already started to use LEGO in Chapel and devotions and maybe we will see some cool LEGO competitions happening in the near future too!