GoldieBlox kits aren’t like other construction toys. Instead of coming in primary colors, or in drab military tones, the kits are pastel: a platform the shade of a robin’s egg, to which you can affix lavender-hued blocks, or daffodil-colored wheels. And they are designed not just to facilitate building but to tell stories about relationships between characters—Goldie and her friends Ruby, Katinka, and Nacho the dog. Debbie Sterling, the founder and C.E.O. of GoldieBlox, spent her girlhood playing princess, ponies, and dress-up before studying engineering at Stanford. She described GoldieBlox to me as “the toy I wish I had growing up.”
The company attracted attention in November for a viral ad in which a trio of little girls, bored with princess play, build an elaborate Rube Goldberg device out of toys and household objects: lamps, flower pots, a pink tea set, a feather boa, a trombone. Now, its soundtrack—a parody of the Beastie Boys song “Girls”—has ignited a legal battle. On November 21st, three days after posting the ad online, GoldieBlox preëmptively went to court to have its version of “Girls” declared fair use; a week later, the company pulled the song from the video. On Tuesday, the Beastie Boys countersued GoldieBlox for the profits earned from using the song, as well as for legal fees and damages.
The controversy has cost GoldieBlox some of the good will it had earned with its message of female empowerment. Jeff John Roberts of Gigaom accused the company of engaging in a “cynical campaign to goose sales before the Thanksgiving shopping season.” The company successfully crowdsourced its seed money on Kickstarter last fall, but now a few backers have taken to the comments page with complaints: “I would like to know if you are truly trying to build a product that will ‘get girls building’ or just trying to sell a product because you happened upon a niche that needed to be filled and are flexing your viral marketing and brand strategy chops,” commented a backer under the name Tara Tiger Brown.
The attention attracted by GoldieBlox says more about our culture, perhaps, than it does about the toy itself. Toys that promote skills in science, technology, math, and engineering (a category known as STEM), particularly for girls, are becoming increasingly popular. Stephanie Oppenheim, the co-founder of ToyPortfolio.com, an independent consumer organization that reviews children’s media and toys, described this as a significant development. “I’ve been covering the toy industry since 1989, and it’s one of the most welcome trends we’ve seen in a long time,” she told me. “There’s such an uptick in toys that really engage kids in thinking about all the STEM topics.”
New companies designing STEM-oriented toys include Roominate, which, like GoldieBlox, looks to improve on the building toy by targeting girls. Roominate kits include modular building pieces in colors like fuchsia and teal that can be assembled into dollhouses and other structures and wired to light up or move. LittleBits, another new offering, is an “open-source library” of magnetically connected circuit boards, from which kids can construct simple electronic devices.
Established companies are also on board. Leapfrog, the educational-toy company, now sells toy laptops that promise to promote computer literacy in toddlers. Updated offerings from big toy companies—like Mega Bloks Barbie (Barbie-themed building kits) and Lego Friends (pastel, character-centered Lego blocks)—relocate construction kits to the “girl toy” aisle.
For the past two years, Andrea Schwalm of Wired’s GeekMom blog has reviewed the STEM offerings at the American International Toy Fair, held annually in New York, with her STEMmy Awards. “Don’t get me wrong,” Schwalm has written. “I don’t for a second believe that toy selection will turn kids into something they are not—but I suspect that toys (in combination with books, movies, teacher expectations, and family attitudes) do help foster interests that can turn into hobbies that can turn into careers.” Other parenting and technology blogs have issued STEM-focussed holiday-shopping guides this year.
“When I grew up, the jobs that your parents wanted you to be was a doctor or a lawyer,” Sterling, of GoldieBlox, told me. “But now I think an engineer or a scientist or someone in technology is becoming a coveted job.”
According to data from the NPD Group, a research firm, sales of building sets rose twenty-two per cent from 2011 to 2012, from $1.63 billion to $1.99 billion; sales of scientific toys and educational toys, while a tiny fraction of over-all toy sales, grew as well, by seventeen per cent and twenty-five per cent, respectively. (Toy sales grew by two per cent over all.) As of Thursday morning, the Goldie Blox and the Spinning Machine kit was ranked eighteenth in the Toys and Games category on Amazon; more than twenty other construction and science toys, including three Lego Friends sets, number in the top hundred. Last month, littleBits raised over eleven million dollars in venture-capital funding.
In fact, while the STEM acronym is relatively new, a fascination with science toys is not. Last year, the Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition called “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” which focussed on design for children. Alongside furniture, clothing, and printed materials, the exhibition featured toys that were, in their time, considered innovative: among them, simple wooden building blocks and crocheted balls designed by the nineteenth-century educator Friedrich Froebel, who believed children could learn about geometry and form by playing with simple objects, and the Omnibot 2000, a remote-controlled robot manufactured in Japan in the nineteen-eighties that could speak and clutch objects in its three-fingered hands.
Juliet Kinchin, the exhibition’s curator, told me that science and building toys became especially popular during the mid-twentieth century, “in the context of space-age competition and international scientific competition.” A 1959 Science News-Letter—quoted in a book that Kinchin and a curatorial assistant, Aidan O’Connor, wrote to accompany the exhibition—listed hundreds of gift options for kids and suggested that year’s popular science toys were “quite likely to result in the sprouting of thousands of brand new scientists under the nation’s Christmas trees.” (Full disclosure: O’Connor is a friend of mine.)
Kids donned plastic astronaut helmets and flew toy rockets. The Capsela building set, originally manufactured in Japan in 1975, invited children to “combine plastic capsules with electric motors, gears, propellers, wheels, and pumps to create real and imaginary vehicles,” O’Connor wrote. Pikotron, a Soviet-bloc circuitry toy sold around the same time, made it possible to “build your own radio set, or a little motorized vehicle,” according to Kinchin.
Tellingly, the current fascination with STEM toys comes at a moment of renewed American awareness of international scientific competition. Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development issued the results of its 2012 Program for International Student Assessment; the United States ranked twenty-sixth out of thirty-four countries in math, and twenty-first in science. The news is even worse for girls; women are woefully underrepresented in STEM disciplines at the university level and professionally. For the past three years, President Obama has used his State of the Union address to call for a new focus on STEM in schools.
Parents are primed for marketing that promises toys that can deliver where schools have fallen short. But can STEM toys really make a difference?
Some toymakers would like us to believe they can. The GoldieBlox Web site says that “by tapping into girls’ strong verbal skills, our story + construction set bolsters confidence in spatial skills while giving young inventors the tools they need to build and create amazing things.” The aim isn’t just play—it’s “to inspire the future generation of female engineers.” Roominate’s Web site says its founders “believe that early exposure through toys will inspire the next generation of female technology innovators.” When Mega Bloks Barbie came out last year, a press release pointed to the “long-term benefits well beyond the playroom” offered by construction toys. (Not all toymakers make these kinds of assertions: Jane Hoffer, the vice-president of operations at littleBits, described her company’s product as an “educational science kit,” but told me that the company doesn’t make specific claims about educational outcomes.)
Jeffrey Trawick-Smith is an education professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he studies children’s play at the Center for Early Childhood Education. He told me that there has been surprisingly little research on individual toys’ effectiveness as learning tools.
Trawick-Smith and his colleagues watch preschoolers playing with specific toys and measure the quality of their play in categories like problem solving, social interaction, and creative expression.
One of their findings might come as a surprise to proponents of complicated educational toys: Across five years of testing, the highest-scoring toy, for boys and girls, has been a basic set of hard wood blocks. That toy promotes “a terrific amount of problem solving…and also mathematical thinking,” Trawick-Smith told me.
Other toys with high scores in categories like “problem solving” and “curiosity and question-asking”—which Trawick-Smith says might be relevant to future STEM learning—have included Tinkertoys and a Lego product for young children called Duplos. Video footage of the research shows a little boy who, while playing with a simple set of flat magnetic shapes called Magna-Tiles, needed a square tile to complete the “tiger house” he was building. When he couldn’t find one, he made one by combining two triangles—a fascinating demonstration of how building toys connect to math concepts. It turns out that what makes toys effective at promoting STEM skills is not gender targeting or complicated design, but qualities like simplicity and open-endedness that allow a child to experiment and explore.
According to Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University and an expert on child learning and development, toy manufacturers often make claims about the educational effectiveness of their products unsupported by evidence. (Neither Hirsh-Pasek nor Trawick-Smith have evaluated the new STEM toys discussed in this piece.)
Sterling, the GoldieBlox C.E.O., said she did “a ton of research into cognitive development in children”—including speaking to neuroscientists, teachers, and people working in after-school programs. She found that girls’ learning and play are typically driven by verbal skills, which is why she made GoldieBlox story-based. More than a hundred kids tested her prototype.
Alice Brooks, who co-founded Roominate, the wired-dollhouse kit, told me that the company’s design drew on its founders’ own engineering experience—both have engineering degrees—and their understanding of the skills important to success: “hands-on problem solving, spatial skills, and self-confidence.” They also tested the game with girls.
Oppenheim is confident that the toys her organization recommends, including GoldieBlox and Roominate, are doing something meaningfully innovative. “These toys are really existing in an entirely different plane in the way they’re being thought out and the way they’re being marketed, and kids are really responding to them,” she said.
Still, one conclusion from the toy research may be that toys meant to promote engineering shouldn’t—or at least don’t need to—be over-engineered. While GoldieBlox kits have received lots of glowing reviews on Amazon, some negative reviews complain that they don’t leave enough room for creativity. “After my child figured it out, she thinks she is done with it, and why do it again,” wrote one user, adding, “I think I will just stick to the gender neutral building toys she spends lots of time with.” (Sterling wrote in an e-mail that each GoldieBlox set “comes with a number of different pieces, and I’ve found that it inspires creativity in girls to even think of their own designs and come up with new machines.” The company also offers expansion packs “to encourage more open-ended play for kids.”)
It’s also worth remembering why kids start playing games in the first place: for fun. Presumably, most of the children who played with Capsela kits in the seventies didn’t grow up to be astronauts. I spent my childhood tinkering—my right thumbnail has been deformed since I split it in two dismantling a vintage typewriter at age five—but I ended up studying English and history in college. Sterling didn’t play with Legos, but still discovered her passion and talent for engineering. Making sure that children, especially girls, have access to engaging toys that might encourage science, technology, math, and engineering skills seems worthwhile. But when it comes to better educating kids, toys are a small part of the answer; we can’t make serious progress without tackling the deficits of our educational system, especially its inequality. Meanwhile, the best toys will continue to do what great toys have always done: absorb children in worlds of play where grownups, with our statistics and anxieties about the future, can’t follow.
Photograph by GoldieBlox.
