Lego's educational space sets are a stellar way to teach kids about the basic physics of collisions and impacts

Click for next article Both Lego Education space boxes and all the experiments you can construct between them. (Image credit: Future / Ian Stokes) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Get the Space.com Newsletter Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more! By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Considering it's ostensibly a children's toy company, Lego sure has been targeting the grown-up market for the past few years. And who can blame them? Targeting the wallets of millennials has been a roaring success for Lego, whether it's mining their sci-fi nostalgia with the Lego USS Enterprise and Lego Star Wars sets , or the moon rovers and NASA Space Launch System . But thankfully, Lego hasn't forgotten about the kids, as we can see from the suite of four new Education sets that it recently added to its line-up: Mars Mission Science Kit , Moon Mission Science Kit , Arctic Animals Science Kit , and Antarctic Animals Science Kit . You're reading this article on a space website, so I'll bet you can guess which two we picked up? Out of the box, these are standard Lego sets: you get a bunch of numbered bags and some instructional books to help you build the kit. So far, so classic Lego, but there are some key differences once you start building. For one thing, the sets have their own defined visual style, using a limited and unique color palette of teal, blue, white and pink. It's a small thing, but we like that the sets have their own visual identity. Image 1 of 2 The Mars Mission box and the experiments inside. (Image credit: Future / Ian Stokes) The Moon Mission box and the experiments inside. (Image credit: Future / Ian Stokes) Each instructional book is split into three stages: Build, Solve, Invent. The first stage features detailed instructions — a step-by-step guide, really — on how to assemble the vehicle or structure in question, but the latter two are delightfully vague. For these latter sections, you're given a rough suggestion of what to build and the pieces necessary to do it, and left to your own devices. Now, as a 30-something man who long since had the creativity sapped out of him by life, this was mildly frustrating at first. I buy Lego sets because I appreciate the soothing satisfaction of following instructions to build something beautiful. But after a brief sulk, I remembered that I'm not the target audience for these sets; they're aimed at kids. That created a problem for me, because I don't have a child. Fortunately, I was able to enlist the assistance of a friend's son at the cost of one babysitting session. For