Tag: New Zealand

Kids News

Lego Minifigures Grumpier Since 1980: Study

Has Lego gotten grumpier?

A new study says that the faces on Lego minifigures have become less happy and more often mad or sad.

The study was designed to find out if the Lego characters have become grumpier over the years.

Christoph Bartneck works at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He loves Lego and even worked for the company in the 1990s. He worked with another researcher on the project.

They looked at all of the 6,000 figures made between 1975 and 2010.

They made a note of each figure’s facial expression: happy, angry, afraid, disgusted, surprised or sad.

They discovered that while in 1980, all of the figures were described as “smiley,” by 1990, only about 80 per cent of them were “smiley.”

Kids News Sports

14-Year-Old Wins Golf Tournament

Fourteen-year-old Lydia Ko has become the youngest person — male or female — ever to win a professional golf tournament.

The teen won the New South Wales Open golf tournament on Jan. 29.

Ko was born in South Korea but moved with her family to New Zealand in 2003. She is the world’s top amateur golfer.

Ko won the tournament by four strokes. That means that the person who came in second took four more shots than Ko did, to complete 18 holes of golf. (In golf, unlike most sports, the winner is the person with the lowest score.)

News

Lost Penguin Back In His Natural Habitat

A woman was walking her dog along a beach in New Zealand in late June when she saw something that looked like a white ball in the sand.

It turned out to be a young Emperor penguin that was very, very lost.

The penguin attracted a lot of attention in New Zealand. It has been 40 years since an Emperor penguin has been seen there.

Researchers at the country’s Department of Conservation were called in.

Many New Zealanders came to Peka Peka Beach to look at the elegant penguin.

They were careful to keep their dogs away from it so it wouldn’t be frightened.

The public nicknamed the animal Happy Feet.