Brick by brick.
Years of building identity, core academics and school pride with LEGO bricks in New York City classrooms. Founded by Syreeta Gates, the first Black woman to compete on LEGO Masters.
Rooted in NYC schools
NYC M/WBE certified
Seen in Forbes and Vogue
LEGO Masters alum
Schools across the city
Building what scholars already know by heart.
“I have spent years in New York City schools with a bin of bricks and a single question. What changes when a scholar can hold the thing they are learning?” Syreeta Gates, Founder
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Syreeta Gates was the first Black woman to compete on LEGO Masters (Fox). The SWT Life is her answer to that question: Build Days that put a whole grade at the table, and custom kits built around the people and places in your building.
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Syreeta has built for Nike, LEGO, Adidas, ComplexCon, Paper Planes, Black Archives and the Sacramento Kings. She brings all of it into your building.
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Forbes, Vogue, Black Enterprise, AfroTech, Because of Them We Can and Ebony are among the many outlets that have covered the work.
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Brick Legends, a LEGO engineering residency that ends in a Build Show for families, is now forming its founding cohort.
Why bricks? The research is on our side.
It predicts STEM careers
Strong spatial ability in high school makes a STEM degree substantially more likely, and it is a skill that can be taught. Wai, Lubinski & Benbow
It works in real classrooms
Classroom teachers, not researchers, ran LEGO building sessions from pictorial instructions and saw gains in spatial reasoning and math. SPACE Study, Univ. of Surrey
Structure beats free play
Building toward a specified outcome produced mental rotation gains after just a few short sessions. Freeform play did not. Newman et al.
Building is engineering
Reading documentation, planning, testing, debugging and revising is the engineering design process. Scholars run it out loud, together. Vyortkina, FSU
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