Who Made the Brick?: teacher key

How Plastic Toy Bricks Are Made, grade 11 edition, written for 11th grade. Histories disagree about who owns the idea of the interlocking brick, and the numbers behind its plastic, its molds and its waste are rougher than they look. A close reading of the evidence, dated to November 2026.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What did LEGO settle with Hilary Page's estate in 1981?
   • To keep using the brick design (answer)
   • To buy the Kiddicraft trademark
   • To close the theme parks
2. What is the job of polybutadiene in ABS?
   • Adds a shiny surface
   • Adds toughness (answer)
   • Adds chemical resistance
3. Why should the figures for mold precision be read as rough and dated?
   • Every source gave the same number
   • Different sources give different tolerances (answer)
   • No one has measured a brick
4. How did the Open University brick fail?
   • It shattered into pieces
   • It melted
   • The material flowed out of the way as it deformed (answer)
5. In this book, what does tolerance mean?
   • The amount of error allowed in a part's size (answer)
   • How much heat a machine can take
   • A brick's color
6. Why does the book say a tower of 375,000 bricks would fail long before the bottom brick?
   • Real loading is never perfectly equal, so a flaw is amplified (answer)
   • The bricks would melt
   • Bricks cannot be stacked

Words

• polybutadiene: rubbery ingredient
• thermoplastics: meltable plastics
• tolerance: allowed error
• deformation: change of shape
• cavity: hollow space