Wednesday, June 18, 2003
By Lynn Shea, Tri-State Sports & News
Service
By the time 25-year-old Jason Burik took a
job teaching sixth-grade English at David E. Williams Middle School
this year, he had already built a small business out of his unusual
talent and enthusiasm for playing with brightly colored interlocking
plastic blocks.
So he knew exactly what he wanted to teach
during the weekly Exploratory Time in his school on Porters Hollow
Road in Kennedy. Every Monday since January, a group of
about 25 pupils has spent the last period of the day constructing a
scale model of the school building out of Legos.
David E. Williams in the Montour School
District is a multidimensional, two-story building sprawled across
the side of a hill. Replicating its design presented significant
challenges, even for Burik, who first gained fame as a Lego builder
when he constructed a scale model of PNC Park.
"The building has lots of angles and it's
built into a hillside," explained Burik.
He took the pupils outside and, using a
digital camera, they photographed the building from every side.
Their attempts to build using the photos were unsuccessful.
Finally, one of his pupils suggested they
use the floor plan map hanging on the wall just outside of Burik's
classroom as a guide.
"I never even noticed it," said Burik of
the you-are-here type map, "and it ended up solving our problem."
Working from the map, the pupils began to
lay out on paper the shape of the building so that they could
establish the proper design. The photos were also used to help
determine where to place the windows and doors.
Burik special-ordered the nearly 1,000
brick-red Lego blocks that were used.
The finished model is 36-by-48 inches and approximates a 400-to-1
scale.
"It's not exact. It's more visual than
mathematical," said Burik.
This is not the first time he has shared
his Lego building skills with younger enthusiasts, though. Last
summer, after teaching school in Baltimore, Burik considered running
a weeklong basketball camp.
Burik, who played Division I basketball for
the University of Maryland Baltimore County, said it was his uncle,
John Zawinski, who persuaded him to run a Lego camp instead.
"He said everyone has basketball camps, you
should do something with the Legos instead."
Twenty children from Freetown Elementary
School in Anne Arundel County, Md., attended the weeklong camp last
June and built a model of their elementary school.
Burik said the pupils learn more than just
how to build with Legos. They learn and use math concepts such as
measuring, estimating, ratio and scale as well as architectural and
engineering design concepts and team building. He also incorporates
digital photography, computer photo editing, economics and writing
into the Lego camp curriculum.
Burik hopes to run more camps in the
future. For now he is staying busy with private clients. He has
built replicas of more than a dozen private homes in Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Florida and Nebraska.
He also has built models of other sports
STADIUMS, including Camden Yards and B&T Stadium in Baltimore and
replicas of the U.S. Capitol and Pittsburgh skyscrapers, such as the
Gulf Building, Fifth Avenue Place, PPG Place and USX Tower.
Burik even built a globe out of Legos, no
easy task considering the spherical shape was constructed entirely
of blue and white square blocks.
Burik credited his uncle with encouraging
him to pursue the business end of his Lego building. He and Zawinski have built and maintain a Lego building Web site at
www.burikmodeldesign.com
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