Your most impressive LEGO creation might be a house. Or a car. Or a pirate ship. Or just a wall of plastic bricks in nice primary colors.

Not to embarrass you, but Andrew Litterst’s is a bunch of LEGO Star Wars spaceships mounted on an electric LEGO train so that they chase each other on tracks around the room. So it’s no wonder he was just named LEGO’s Master Builder in the D.C. region — the first to hold that title at the soon-to-open LEGO Discovery Center in Northern Virginia.

Litterst grew up in Springfield, building LEGO creations with his brother and his dad. He still remembers the first LEGO set he ever got — it was pirates-themed — for Christmas in 1995. He and his dad and his brother were all hooked.

As for that Star Wars train creation, “My brother got super jealous and he stole the idea,” Litterst remembers. “We got into plenty of arguments over whose turn it was to play with the train set.”

Litterst has been a park ranger, an interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, and most recently a science teacher, a job he held for eight years before leaving last year. He rediscovered his love for LEGO while homebound during the pandemic.

“I hopped on the Internet, ordered a couple of sets, and it was kind of a rekindling there,” he says. He put some of them on display in the background of his Zoom lessons.

“From there, you know, one set led to another and that led to three more. That led to five more. And here we are today,” he says.

“Here” is getting ready to put all that LEGO experience and creativity to use at the D.C. area’s new LEGO Discovery Center, which is opening at Springfield Town Center this summer. The center will offer play-based learning activities for kids and their families, including a build-your-own rocket project where kids can digitally scan their model and fly it in a space video game. (Oh, and it will sell a LOT of LEGOs.)

“My dad makes the joke, ‘Oh, looks like the $10,000 we spent on LEGO sets throughout your life are starting to pay dividends,” Litterst says. “I told him to stop being so dramatic, it’s probably closer to $16,000, but we’ll get into semantics with that later.”

As Master Model Builder, Litterst will lead the creative workshops, as well as designing, building and maintaining no-doubt epic LEGO models for the store.

So how did he land it? Let’s just say it wasn’t the most traditional job application process. After an initial application — complete with video introduction to a model — and the obligatory phone screener with an HR representative, he was invited to compete for the job with 14 finalists from all over the country at an event called Brick Factor last weekend.

Think of the Great British Baking Show, only for LEGO creations, and with hundreds of onlookers — not to mention kid helpers running around. There were three rounds: First, contestants had 30 minutes to make a Super Bowl-themed LEGO build, a theme they knew about in advance. Litterst, true to his background as an environmental science teacher, went with a “superb owl” theme and created a football with an owlish head.

Next up was a surprise challenge: build a space-themed LEGO scene in 30 minutes. For that one, he had some help coming up with an idea for what to make on the fly.

He was starting to build a space shuttle “or something,” he says, when a young attendee named Elizabeth came over to see what he was working on. “I said, ‘You know, if you were here, what would you want to build?’ And she just immediately gave me [the idea for] a Mars Rover,” he says. “I said, ‘I like that idea. That’s what we’re going to go with.’”

Elizabeth didn’t stop there: Litterst says she slapped together a prototype for a rover wheel, and he was so impressed he asked her to go ahead and make the other three.

That, by the way, is what Litterst hopes to do with his new gig: inspire kid visitors to tap into their own creativity.

“I come from an education background and I’m very aware of just how creative kids tend to be on the spot without thinking about it,” he says. “The more I engage with them, the more creative I think my builds end up being.”

Litterst’s final task of the competition? An elaborate three-piece creation meant to represent himself — all in 60 minutes. And if by this point you’re unconvinced that Litterst is going to bring plenty of fun and whimsy to his new role, well: his LEGO sculpture was of a volcano (his favorite thing to teach in his Earth science classes), with Teddy Roosevelt (his favorite president, and a representation of his love for the Nationals) escaping from the fiery inferno on the back of Litterst’s black-and-white tuxedo cat.

“Bit of a fever dream there,” he admits. “I kept making the joke, you know, ‘I hope no one else steals my idea.’”

Brick Factor featured a motley crew of judges — former Washington Commanders player Tim Hightower, new team mascot Major Tuddy, Fairfax County Franconia District Supervisor Rodney Lusk, Fairfax schools’ 2022 Outstanding Elementary Teacher Essel Linton — and a group of kids.

“There’s nothing more nerve-wracking than being judged by five elementary school age children,” Litterst jokes. “It is quite terrifying.”

But they picked Litterst as the winner. He got a shower of LEGO bricks, a bright yellow LEGO trophy, a hard hat — and a new job.

He’s still getting his head around the idea that his new life will have even more LEGO projects than before, but Litterst has already identified a few ambitions for the new role. He’s excited to give the local LEGO store a D.C. feel, with builds honoring the District’s famous (and less famous) monuments and other landmarks.

He’s got some help with that: when he’s not messing around with LEGO bricks himself, Litterst’s father, Mike Litterst, works in communications for the National Park Service — “He’s mostly talking about the cherry blossoms and whenever the elevator breaks in the Washington Monument, that’s kind of our joke,” quips his son. The father gave his expert blessing on a model replica of the western end of the National Mall that Litterst submitted as part of the application process. (The model included Darth Vader seated inside the Lincoln Memorial, an artistic choice Litterst made when he found he didn’t have a Lincoln LEGO figurine.)

“Being able to kind of represent the D.C. area for people coming in from all around the world, it’s going to be a really special opportunity,” he says.

Litterst, always a teacher at heart, also hopes he can use his new role to bring LEGO projects into local schools — though he’d likely gear those to elementary school, not the high schoolers he used to teach. He sees LEGO as a way for kids to learn the scientific method.

“You have an idea, you want to try to test something to see what works. You start building something. If it works, great, you’ve answered your question, but if it doesn’t work, you need to tear it down,” he says “You’ll learn from your mistakes and you get to start building all over again.”

And that excitement carries on into adulthood.

“I guess you never really do grow out of some of these things,” Litterst says.