WHAT happens when you mix science fiction, building blocks and a desire to break the rules? Legohacker.

Anyone who's old enough to know anything will know Lego just isn't what it used to be.

While once it was all about imagination and creating something from scratch, now it seems like every second block is locked to a toy franchise.

But one young enthusiast isn't going to take it lying down.

One of this week's most talked about blogs tracks the inventions of a Lego fan who "hacks" the official sets to turn them into something else.

His latest favourite is turning Star Wars sets into ships from Star Trek — using only the pieces that were included in the box.

But while the 12-year-old boy behind Legohacker been lauded by nerd bibles Boing Boing and Wired, he isn't one for the spotlight.

His father, Jon Ippolito, said it wasn't because he was shy that his son didn't want his name out there, but because he was humble.

"I think he sees attaching his name to these things as a form of bragging," he told news.com.au.

Mr Ippolito, an associate professor of new media at The University of Maine, said he started the blog to document the creativity of his son and his nine-year-old daughter.

"When I had kids I was eager to see what kind of creativity they would spill on a page full of crayon drawings or a lump of Play Dough or, in this case, a bunch of Legos," he said.

"I was pretty astonished to see how sophisticated the kind of thinking outside the box they did was.

"In particular my son, when he was about 4, started to put blocks together in ways that I didn't even think were possible."

One entry on Legohacker shows a Lego Star Wars Clone Walker turned into a Klingon warship. Another shows a Hyena Droid Bomber turned into a Dominion battlecruiser.

Mr Ippolito said his son put together the original sets "incredibly fast", but then was even faster to reimagine them.

"I'm sure this is true of a lot of Lego enthusiasts, young and old, that they get one of these enormous 900-piece sets and they've got it built in a few hours," he said.

"What I find more remarkable is that my son will create these hacks very quickly too, even though he has nothing to go on — there's no instructions.

"It can be as quick as a matter of minutes."

And why Star Trek? Mr Ippolito said his family didn't own a TV, but they still watched some films and shows.

"When we were young our parents watched Star Trek. It was something that families did together," he said.

But since introducing his children to the Star Trek universe, their knowledge had far outgrown his own, Mr Ippolito said.

"Of course once you let children into any sphere they often start to eat it up and ravenously consume all the aspects of that kind of world," he said.

"They quickly learned a lot more than I ever knew about all these different classes of ships and people and races and so on.

"My son will look at a certain kind of ship and instantly identify what it is and I have no idea."

Links

Legohacker — http://legohacker.blogspot.com/