A King Kong–size duck waddled over to the park and, fluffing its feathers, settled into the meadow, throwing an immense shadow over the surrounding grove of trees. There were no screaming waves of city folk running for their lives, however. Only three bemused visitors to Legoland California — my husband, Eric, my 12-year-old daughter, Kirsten, and I — laughing over the incongruous nature of the avian interloper nesting in the Lilliputian Jackson Square of New Orleans.

“I spent much of my youth hanging out in Jackson Square,” said Eric, my husband, a New Orleans native. “And it looked exactly like that,” he said, gesturing to the tiny tree-studded model.

“Really?” I quipped. “Exactly?” How many trees did you crush when you sat down?”

Kids can help put out a "fire" in a burning building in Legoland's Fun Town Fire Academy.

Eric made a sour face. Yet he couldn’t hold back a smile.

We were on a whirlwind southern California theme park trip, visiting the 128-acre (0.5 km²) Legoland, in Carlsbad, and Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure, in Anaheim.

It was Eric’s first visit to Legoland, a place that Kirsten and I have returned to again and again, each time experiencing the latest rides and attractions, many of them kid powered.

Unlike the usual theme-park rides that require complicated safety harnesses and high-powered automation to jostle squeals and screams out of riders, Legoland rides take the low-tech approach, with kids using their own power to make some of the rides “go.”

It seems to me a wonderful antidote to the way today’s kids have a glazed-eyed devotion to handheld electronics devices, with thumbs being the only thing exercised.

Kids at Legoland were riding model fire trucks to put out a simulated fire in a kid-size building; driving miniature cars in the Volvo Driving School; and playing golf in the new Wild Woods golf course.

Every attraction at the park contains astonishingly detailed models built exclusively from that low-tech/high-imagination construction toy, Legos. Some 50 million Legos are used throughout the park, ranging from robotic elephants spouting water (Kirsten’s favorite) to a life-size dinosaur.

In addition to the low-tech attractions that are so popular among the elementary-school set, the park has been revving up its offerings for older kids, with recent additions such as Knights’ Tournament, which opened in 2005, featuring robotic arms that tilt, spin and jostle riders in an imaginary fight against an immense “fire-breathing” Lego dragon.

In the Imagination Zone, we were drawn to the beehive of activity in one room, where a half-dozen boys and girls raced between computer monitors and Lego Mindstorms robots. The intensity in the room was at a fever pitch as the kids built their own robots and programmed them. I imagined these young techno-geeks as tomorrow’s software or robotics engineers, bringing new high-tech devices to life that might help solve some of the world’s problems.

While Legoland California benefits from the cooling onshore breezes of the nearby coast, it is still California, and temperatures can soar in summertime. Consequently, four new water attractions open June 21 in an area called Pirate Shores.

In Splash Battle, the only ride of its kind in the United States, kids can navigate pirate ships, complete with water cannons, on “high-seas adventures.” Exploding volcanoes and roving bands of pirates add to the adrenaline thrills. Treasure Falls is a mini-flume log ride with two plunges. Soak-N-Sail, in the form of a shipwrecked pirate vessel, has more than 60 interactive water features for kids to play in, and a water-and-shore area offers passive recreation.

Sixty miles (96 km) north, water was the conveyance of Eric’s favorite attraction at Disneyland, in which we boarded boats and were propelled through a cavernous, brightly lit space and assailed by robotic, ethnically dressed dolls incessantly singing a song. Never in a million years would I have guessed that Eric, my “I’ve never had an interest in theme parks” husband, would find It’s a Small World enlightening. Yet here he was, grinning broadly.