Set 11946 “Penguin” comes with issue 7 of LEGO Explorer magazine. The focus of the magazine is on education of young lego fans about a certain topic as well as teaching new and interesting building techniques with tips written by LEGO designers.

This issue is called “Polar Exploration” and has a big spread of information on penguins as well as several arctic animals, a big section about hibernation and another on human exploration. The penguin section in particular is very well researched and has a lot of facts I didn't know.

The issue's “Brick Master” section focuses on the 87087 “1x1 Brick with Side Stud” and has a lot of great examples of studs-on-the-side building, the best of which is this set itself.

The penguin isn't the usual emperor penguin build! It's based either on a macaroni penguin or rockhopper penguin, both of which are featured in the magazine. I think it's great to showcase a lesser known animal as the build here.

The construction is basically a tower of multicoloured stud-on-the-side bricks and plates which go a long way into illustrating the geometry of studs-on-the-side construction which, given the magazine's aim to teach children about those techniques, is great.

There are some interesting uses of tiles in the build too, as well as minifig flippers for its feet - the latter is a great example to kids that you can use minifig parts on things that aren't minifigs!

The eyes are a fairly common print, but you can never have too many eye tiles, no matter your age. I wish it didn't look like it was always asleep though.

The best pieces are certainly the eight 26604 1x2 brick with studs on 2 adjacent sides which come in medium blue. They come in only a handful of sets in that colour and this is definitely the cheapest way to get them.

The penguin lacks articulation except a little in the feet (and the beak, but I don't think that was intentional), though the magazine does show an example of an articulated version of the model after the end of the instructions, encouraging children to modify the model with some small ball joints and a turntable. Given how complete this looks just as a little penguin statue I think the lack of out-of-the-bag articulation can be forgiven, but it's unfortunate that the 5-6 parts needed to articulate it weren't included.

In all though I think this set looks great and does a great job in both teaching the builder about studs-on-the-side techniques and representing a lesser-known but interesting species. The only issue for me is that it's not a very dynamic model, but the magazine it comes with does encourage you to change that with your own parts.