For their latest mind-boggling trick, CU-Boulder has found a new and unusual way to spend your tuition money: building a life-like Lego model of the CU-Boulder campus.

For their latest mind-boggling trick, CU-Boulder has found a new and unusual way to spend your tuition money: building a life-like Lego model of the CU-Boulder campus.

The project, called Hit the Bricks, was comissioned by the CU-Boulder Heritage Center to mimick campus life on a smaller scale. It was made by the Colorado/Wyoming Lego Users Group, who used more than 500,000 Legos to create the display. Yeah, we were just as surprised as you to find out was an actual thing.

The 12 x 17 foot model includes Old Main and several other iconic campus buildings, as well as depicts several vignettes of signature CU-life, like that time a bear climbed a tree, the Naked Mile, and the Foucault Pendulum at the Duane Physical Laboratory. 

But as realistic as most of the elements are, others are fictionalized. In one section, a road crumbles into the mouth of an alien emerging from the depths of hell.  Elsewhere, there's an archeological dig going on, complete with a news team reporting live. Do you think they found where they bury plagiarizers? The former is a wink at CU's celebrated connection to the space program and the latter a nod to its archaeology department. Fun!

Weighing at 1,000 pounds, the Lego CU leaves plenty of room for artistic license and future additions, something that the Lego freaks that built it revel in. They plan to add a Lego Fiske Planetarium in 2015. We can hardly wait.

No word yet on whether they're working on a "dispersing 420 rally" addition yet, but if they do, we hope it smells just as bad as the real thing.

Look!