The sorting is colour first for me. Colour is the resource that matters, the limiting factor to a model. Therefore I find it amusing that this is not the primary consideration.
As a child I found that the models made by my sister and myself were in a different league to those of the other kids because of this aspect of colour. We could use every brick in the box to build a townscape but nothing in the scene would be built without attention to the colours. Some other house or building might have to be part demolished to get the right colour bricks, it came down to resource optimisation. Those other kids that didn't have the colours sorted out were beginner level, they had worked out the bricks stick together but hadn't worked out that colours matter, as they do with the Lego sets, which are never jumble sale coloured with random bricks everywhere. There always has to be this aspect of taste to the colours.
Right now I do have a manually sorted selection of bricks. They are for my niece when she is old enough to move on from Duplo. We have sorted the bricks by colour and then by size. The challenge to this has also involved washing them with the sorting being by colour and then size granularity. There are specials such as the flowers and other vegetation, doors/windows and so forth. In theory my niece will be able to get the bigger blocks first and then the specialised fiddly piece, e.g. 1x tiles, can come along later.
There have been other decisions made, for instance the mini-figures have been broken down to their component parts so that there is no knowing what they were originally. There are just lots of tops/bottoms/heads and hairdos.
We are short of roof parts. But who is to know if my niece would want to be making the town scene that was the de-facto model that my sister and myself would want to make?
I also think too many specialist brick shapes can be bad for the imagination, so I hope the staggered release of basic blocks to then move on to the smaller pieces will help with this aspect of creative possibilities for my niece. My niece is a single child so won't have resource wars with a sibling, which is a bit sad.
There are many potential customers, including those too old for LEGO (not that you can ever be too old for it), I hope my 'colour first' pointers help.
Sorting color is problematic. Yes, it is an easy first sort step with relatively limited number of output bins. But once sorted by color it becomes 10 times at least harder to pick out a shape. Anybody that I know that has sorted Lego in quantity first goes for that because it seems so obvious, and then after a while all of them revert.
Think about it: pick the 2x4 brick in red from a pile of 2x4 bricks in various colors vs pick the 2x4 brick in red from a pile of red bricks in various shapes. The first you can do in a heartbeat, the second will take much longer, and it is also much harder to determine that a piece isn't there in the first place.
As a child I found that the models made by my sister and myself were in a different league to those of the other kids because of this aspect of colour. We could use every brick in the box to build a townscape but nothing in the scene would be built without attention to the colours. Some other house or building might have to be part demolished to get the right colour bricks, it came down to resource optimisation. Those other kids that didn't have the colours sorted out were beginner level, they had worked out the bricks stick together but hadn't worked out that colours matter, as they do with the Lego sets, which are never jumble sale coloured with random bricks everywhere. There always has to be this aspect of taste to the colours.
Right now I do have a manually sorted selection of bricks. They are for my niece when she is old enough to move on from Duplo. We have sorted the bricks by colour and then by size. The challenge to this has also involved washing them with the sorting being by colour and then size granularity. There are specials such as the flowers and other vegetation, doors/windows and so forth. In theory my niece will be able to get the bigger blocks first and then the specialised fiddly piece, e.g. 1x tiles, can come along later.
There have been other decisions made, for instance the mini-figures have been broken down to their component parts so that there is no knowing what they were originally. There are just lots of tops/bottoms/heads and hairdos.
We are short of roof parts. But who is to know if my niece would want to be making the town scene that was the de-facto model that my sister and myself would want to make?
I also think too many specialist brick shapes can be bad for the imagination, so I hope the staggered release of basic blocks to then move on to the smaller pieces will help with this aspect of creative possibilities for my niece. My niece is a single child so won't have resource wars with a sibling, which is a bit sad.
There are many potential customers, including those too old for LEGO (not that you can ever be too old for it), I hope my 'colour first' pointers help.