The course An Introduction to Design through Making provides a hands-on introduction to maker education. Course modules can be found at the link below:
Make to Learn
This forum strand focuses on the prototyping with LEGO bricks as a stepping stone to 3D design in CAD software.
I started by finding an image of a water buffalo online. I then had the background removed from the photo, isolating the buffalo and the bird on its back from the surrounding sky and trees. The result was saved as a transparent PNG alongside the original.
To convert the photo directly into a 2D mosaic pattern, I prompted the AI to create a pixelated version sized for a standard LEGO baseplate. This produced a 48 × 50 stud mosaic using a 16-color palette (2,400 studs total), plus a gridded version overlaid with lines to serve as a build plan. However, the result was muddy and hard to read. I therefore prompted the AI to refine the image before re-pixelating.
This produced a 64 × 66 stud mosaic with a 20-color palette (4,224 studs), where the eyes, horn boss, and lighter muzzle were all clearly distinguishable. Both a clean low-resolution version and a gridded build plan version were saved.
Next, I prompted Google Gemini to transform the 2D mosaic into a simple-enough-to-build 3D LEGO image. Gemini returned the image, which I used as my reference image to construct the 3D LEGO buffalo
3D OWL LEGO MOSAIC: Siisa Precious and Kuloba Emma
We started by downloading a high-quality image of an owl and removed the background from the image using a background removal tool. The result was saved as a transparent PNG alongside the original.
To convert the photo directly into a 2D mosaic pattern, we prompted the AI to create a pixelated version sized for a standard LEGO baseplate. This produced a mosaic using a 6-color palette and a gridded version. We continually prompted the AI to refine the image before re-pixelating until we got a result that was satisfactory.
Then we employed Google Gemini to transform the 2D mosaic into a 3D Lego mosaic based on the 2D mosaic. Google Gemini generated a 3D image of the Lego owl, which we used as our building plan.
Then, after we gathered all thebricks and the plates of different colours that we would use for example grey bricks, brown bricks, grime bricks, the green base plate and a 1 by 1stud for both the eyes.
We started by building the abdomen, which took 4 by 4 bricks for the width and 2 by 2 for the length, and we had to build the thorax, we used 2 by 2 bricks for the width and 2 by 2 then for length. We then built the wings, and we used 16 brick which were 4 and then attached them on the thorax part at opposite sides.
Lastly was the head we used for 4 grey bricks each 1 by 8. We first built the side parts with 3 brown bricks for the front and 26 small grime parts and used 2 studs of 1 by 1 where we fixed the eyes,2 by 3 slope brick for the nose and the top part made of 1 by 1 brick.
