Kicking off the OKI LUG Junior!

OKILUG (Ohio Kentucky Indiana) is celebrating our 10 year anniversary in 2019. One of the things that our club has wanted to implement for a while now is a Junior division. A place where kids ages 6 – 17 could be part of our club at events and meet monthly for developing their building skills. We decided in late 2018 that we would begin working with local libraries, who we had previously worked with for LUG events, and utilize those locations for our meet ups. We needed a group of people to help head this up as well, and I am happy to say that several club members stepped up to get the ball rolling on this with several planning meetings.

The goal for our club has always been to promote LEGO® and the hobby as well as serve the community.  With OKILUG Junior, we wanted to continue that with the younger members. Starting small and growing is our plan and with the first meeting we wanted to get an idea of the interest in the community. Being close to Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, and Southeastern Indiana, we didn’t know how well this would be received or the turnout that we would have.

Through social media, and  word of mouth, we advertised our first event. At the event, we had a total of 23 prospective junior members show up and participate. The meeting started with introductions of the club members and a quick overview of our vision for the club. We tried to keep it short and succinct considering that we had age ranges from 7 to 15. A lot of kids had questions about terminology and several just wanted to talk about things they may have already built. One thing we learned at the meeting was the fact that no matter what age, they really just wanted to get to building.

After about ½ hour of talking to the kids, we turned them loose with building. Our club had put together several large bins of LEGO all shapes, colors, and sizes. These were distributed to the building tables and we let the kids do what they wanted to do. Over the next 90 minutes, all of the participants worked on a build, whether it be small one person builds or collaborative three or four people builds.

At the end of the meeting, we asked if participants wanted their builds to be shown off at the library in the month of February. As another month long event that we do, we have space reserved at one of the local libraries where we show off some of our club builds for all to see. This month, we were able to add 14 different kids builds and have their names associated for everyone to see. We have received a very positive response and plan to continue offering this.

OKILUG Junior will continue meeting on a monthly basis with a summer cook out and Christmas party in December. We hope to have even better attendance the as the year continues. Our Junior club members will event be able to participate in our upcoming shows with the focus being on our Lil’ Brick Show that will take place in early May 2019. We anticipate providing space for our OKI LUG Junior club members alongside the larger builds from our club. We will look to expand the club as we move forward and work through collaborative builds while teaching building techniques.

We feel that a successful kickoff event will lead to a great opportunity to expand the club further. Our hope is to grow to around 30 active full time members and start planning builds after we teach more building techniques. We are also looking to replicate our LUG format with eventually having officer’s to represent the Junior club. We will continue working with the community in order to promote the LEGO hobby as well as bring new creative talent to both of our clubs.

So far, we feel we are off to a strong start!

To follow our journey, take a look at our OKILUG Junior facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/okilugjunior/