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Saturday, February 2, 2002
By Jenny O'Grady, Maryland Gazette
As an
eigth-grader in his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA Jason Burik dumped all of his thousands of LEGO building blocks into one pile and assembled a scale model of his two-story home from the very blueprints.
With spray paint and some patience, he turned the primary colored plastic into a masterpiece of brick and neat leafy landscaping.
But that was only the beginning. A few years later, the sports buff turned thousands of the blocks into his favorite stadiums and cityscapes.
Today, as a teacher at Freetown Elementary School, Mr. Burik has his sights set on building something even greater - the minds and imaginations of his students.
"I think LEGO blocks can be a bridge to teaching," said the fifth-grade social studies and language arts teacher who runs a side business building LEGO models for individuals and companies.
"They can teach you so many important
skills," he said. "The students are learning, and they don't even realize it."
A LEGO maniac since he was 8 years old, Mr. Burik always enjoyed the challenge of designing his own projects. Besides houses in his neighborhood, he
was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Pirates to build a replica of
their new ballpark, PNC Park. He has also built Orioles Park at Camden Yards, even the Ravens' purple and black PSINet Stadium.
"He nailed the whole thing," said Jim Alexander, director of ticket sales and services for the Pirates, who said the LEGO structure cost almost $40,000 less than an architectural model would. "At Pirate Fest, everybody was interested in it. The detail he put into it is amazing. It was a big hit."
Mr. Burik's most difficult project to date - an unpainted world globe made of more than 1,000 blue and white blocks - took more than three months. The hardest part, he said, was figuring out how to make a round object from sqaure blocks.
"It's like an art form," he said. Mr. Burik graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County - where he and his wife-to-be, Kathy Doyle, played basketball - in 2000.
Mr. Burik hopes to create a LEGO club where students of all grade levels would participate in building a block replica of Freetown Elementary School - right down to the playground and the blue dolphin mascots above the front door.
The skills involved - measuring, determining scale, painting, and others - would help bring classroom lessons to life, he said.
"I think our school could benefit from that immensely," said Sharon
Mabbott, a mentor teacher at the school. "He's doing a great job."
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