Our Story

I'm Alp. I was born in İzmir in 2008, and I have been a LEGO enthusiast and collector for as long as I can remember. I spent most of my childhood building LEGO sets and displaying them in every corner of our home.

In 2016, when I was eight, I became a big brother. My sister was born into a home already surrounded by LEGO.

When she started crawling, my family worried constantly about stray LEGO pieces on the floor. Somehow, though, she seemed to know exactly what to do with them. Instead of putting them in her mouth, she would pick them up and bring them straight to me.

When my sister was three and a half, she attended preschool for a short time. Then the pandemic began. I was in seventh grade when schools closed and lockdowns started.

The pandemic was also when my LEGO obsession began turning into projects.

I would start a LEGO set in the morning and finish it the same day, until eventually I had nothing new left to build. So I started making stop-motion videos and developing small projects with LEGO instead.

For those videos, I took hundreds of photographs. I usually gave my sister one very important job: pressing the camera button.

Later, I began reading comments under handwashing videos published by major organizations. Many people were criticizing how much water was being wasted while demonstrating proper handwashing.

That was when I started thinking differently.

I began building projects: a smart faucet that taught handwashing while saving water, a smart test book designed around inequalities in remote education during the pandemic, a Scratch-based game for learning mathematics formulas through LEGO, and a smart traffic-light system designed for disadvantaged groups.

Those projects went on to receive different awards and recognitions, but they all had one thing in common: LEGO had become a tool I could transform into almost anything in order to approach a social problem differently.

Eventually, the pandemic ended and schools reopened.

My sister returned to preschool. At first, everything seemed completely normal. She went happily every day and joined the activities without any difficulty.

About a month later, however, the school called my family in for a meeting.

They told us that my sister participated in every game and activity and seemed happy — but she never spoke. They suggested that we seek professional support.

We had never realized there was a problem.

During the pandemic, my sister had spoken normally with the close family members we saw. When she did not speak to other people, we assumed she was simply young or shy.

Following her teachers' advice, my family took her to a psychiatrist.

My sister began weekly play therapy.

At almost exactly the same time, several of my own projects were reaching the finals of different competitions.

When my smart-faucet project became a finalist in one of Türkiye's largest technology competitions, my family and I traveled to Trabzon for four days.

That trip was when we truly began to understand what selective mutism meant — not from a definition, but by living through it.

For four days, my sister did not speak to anyone except us.

Even when other people were around, she would only speak to us by whispering into our ears.

She played with my teachers without speaking, communicating through gestures instead. Families were not normally allowed into the project exhibition area, yet she would hold my teachers' hands and find her way over to me.

While I was presenting my projects to judges and students from other schools, people sometimes asked questions about the LEGO faucet, the video, or the model.

My sister often knew exactly what she wanted to say.

She would stand below me and pull at my T-shirt until I bent down to her height and offered her my ear.

Then she would whisper her answer to me.

Once, while she was pulling at my shirt again because she wanted to tell me something, I became impatient and said, “Wait a minute.”

I still remember the tears in her eyes.

That moment has stayed with me.

I started thinking about how difficult it must have been for my sister to spend four days unable to speak. For the first time, I truly understood how hard she was trying just to be there for me.

That same project exhibition also became the place where I first saw something that would later become central to Mini-Talks: the power of personalized minifigures and play.

For my smart-faucet project, I had built a LEGO school with a classroom, cafeteria, and bathroom to demonstrate how the system could be used in schools.

I had also created a minifigure that looked like my sister.

She began playing with that figure inside my LEGO school — taking it to class, sending it to the cafeteria, washing its hands, and taking it to the bathroom.

She moved her lips almost imperceptibly, making the minifigures speak silently to one another.

I made up silly stories.

She laughed while covering her mouth because even laughing out loud made her anxious.

From then on, making minifigures “talk” to one another across different LEGO sets and scenes became one of her favorite ways to play.

And from then on, I tried to become the big brother who could make her laugh, be silly with her, and somehow help her feel less afraid of speaking.

Months into play therapy, she began using a minifigure to play with her psychologist while speaking in a very quiet voice.

Later, she also began speech and language therapy.

The work then gradually moved outside the therapy room — onto streets, into restaurants and supermarkets, and into conversations with both familiar people and complete strangers.

When she first began speaking to unfamiliar people, we noticed that she constantly twisted the fabric of her T-shirt or lifted one foot while talking.

With guidance from her speech and language therapist, she then began occupational therapy as well.

She was often more comfortable during exercises when I was involved.

Sometimes she would tell my family:

My approach was different.

I would read the menu to her in the most ridiculous way possible and pretend I was about to faint from hunger.

Sometimes she would end up ordering not only for herself, but for me too.

The pizza restaurant in Mini-Designs is based directly on the restaurant where she first placed an order by herself.

At the supermarket, instead of doing one large grocery trip, we started going almost every day to buy one small thing.

Because the employees understood what she was working through and supported her patiently, she spent a long time answering questions such as the number of shopping bags simply by showing the number with her fingers.

Eventually, she began saying the numbers out loud.

The supermarket scene in Mini-Designs is based on the actual checkout where she first spoke.

My sister did not speak at school for ten months.

During that time, the support of her teachers was incredibly important.

Even without speaking, she continued taking part in games, performances, and school activities.

At her first performance, she joined the choir through the choreography without even moving her lips.

At the next one, she began moving her lips and silently mouthing the words.

For the end-of-year performance, the teachers had carefully created a role for her that would allow her to participate without speaking.

During the part in which every child would recite an individual poem, she would simply walk onto the stage carrying a flower.

But two days before the performance, my sister began speaking at school.

With only two days to prepare, she walked onto the stage and recited her own poem.

Her teachers cried with happiness.

The school performance and birthday-party designs in Mini-Designs come from the kinds of social events that can be especially difficult for children experiencing selective mutism.

My sister started primary school, and I started high school.

Around that time, one of her biggest wishes finally came true: we adopted a dog.

After years of having LEGO all around the house, we now had what felt like a living LEGO too.

So, naturally, we named him Lego.

With Lego by her side, my sister began practicing speaking with people such as the veterinarian and the dog groomer.

Her therapy continued to involve more and more people from our everyday lives.

My Turkish teacher, whom she had seen every week for nearly two years without speaking to, eventually became part of that process too.

Thanks to his patience and commitment, she eventually began speaking with him as well.

The children's book he later wrote, Sessiz Maestro, was inspired partly by her story and by his desire to raise awareness of selective mutism.

Behind that book was a very long period of patience.

I also began running LEGO workshops with middle-school students, using the app to explore Braille together.

My sister would occasionally join those workshops and build LEGO alongside us.

She created LEGO designs for visually impaired students to explore by touch. They understood that she did not speak, accepted it without making it a problem, talked to her anyway, and played LEGO together.

The selective mutism journey itself did not move in a straight line.

Sometimes there was visible progress.

Sometimes nothing seemed to change for a long time.

One summer, I traveled to Oxford for an engineering program.

I called my sister on video constantly.

She had made a calendar to count the days until I came home and colored in each day as it passed.

Sometimes she colored extra days because she wanted me to return sooner. Sometimes she forgot which days she had already colored and became confused.

For my final engineering project at the program, I built a smart countdown device that showed how many days remained until a particular event.

I used Arduino and designed it so children could personalize it with LEGO.

The idea was to create a reminder and habit-building device for preschool children and people living with Alzheimer's.

The project received the program's top engineering award.

But the part that mattered most to me was how happy my sister was.

During those years, I attended several award ceremonies for my LEGO-based projects.

At every one of them, my sister sat in crowded conference halls, stayed close to me, and applauded from the front row until her hands hurt.

But she did not speak to anyone.

FIRST LEGO League tournaments eventually became one of the places that helped her become more comfortable in crowded environments.

Throughout high school, I volunteered at these tournaments.

For years, my sister would arrive toward the end of the event and watch me from a distance.

Over time, she won the hearts of the other volunteers.

She became our youngest volunteer.

At first, she was given small jobs she could do without speaking — tasks that allowed her to participate while still feeling safe.

Then, at one tournament, she walked onto the stage, announced the winning team number, and handed over the trophy.

That experience showed me once again how much the way people respond to a child can change that child's life.

Another summer, while attending a program in the United States, I ordered every book I could find about selective mutism to my dorm room.

The children's book recordings in the Resources section of Mini-Talks — read in my sister's own voice — came from the idea of encouraging younger children who are still learning to read and who may be going through a similar experience.

On another trip to the United States, I brought my sister a small voice-recording device, or talk pad.

That simple device helped her begin speaking with several of my friends she had never spoken to before.

My friends were staying at our house.

While we played console games, my sister would watch us and join the conversation by smiling and laughing without speaking.

Whenever our football match ended, she would lean toward my ear and whisper:

So we would play it for her.

One morning, she picked up the voice recorder and said:

She recorded herself saying, “Shall we play LEGO on Xbox?”

Then, holding her minifigure, she played the recording for my friends.

They asked her a simple question:

“Before breakfast or after?”

This time, she answered out loud:

And after that, she began speaking with them normally.

Personalized scenes. Personalized minifigures. A child's own recorded voice.

Those experiences began coming together into one idea.

The personalized LEGO environments she had used while playing, the minifigures she could speak through more comfortably, and the voice recorder that had helped bridge a difficult conversation all became part of how I began thinking about Mini-Talks.

The ideas that eventually became Brick-Talks and Fig-Talks grew from those experiences.

Today, my sister is nine years old.

There is no one left in her life that she does not speak to.

The thing she wants to do most now is voice acting.

She has started taking dubbing classes, and her voice becomes more confident every day.

She is now almost as excited about Mini-Talks as I am.

Today, she can explain what those years of being unable to speak felt like.

And she wants to use that experience to support younger children who are still going through it.