Fantastic toys that promote STEM skills!

As promised, Part 2 of 3 in our mini-series taking an insider look at last week's NYC Toy Fair 2015! Today's topic:

Toys designed to encourage girls to want to develop their science & technology skills! 
(Science Technology Engineering & Math = STEM skills)

My last post highlighted robots, magnetic trucks, and an electrics-kit for scientific experiments. The majority of the many robotics & building sets that I saw at the toy fair were geared towards traditionally male-oriented interests, and the predominant toy/package colors were blue, gray, black, green, white ... with a touch of orange or red here and there.

Product test-groups have shown that when a mixed group of children were given the choice between a gray robot or a pink robot, almost all of the boys chose to play with the former and the girls chose to play with the latter. Packaging & colors have an enormous impact on which toys children want to buy, and which toys the adult-buyer thinks their boy or girl will want to play with. And there are of course other fundamental characteristics that kids have which will influence their toy decisions too. For example, many children with traditionally feminine interests may be intrigued by the thought of making an electrically-engineered doll house more than they would be inspired to want to try to make a robot boxing-match. 

So I definitely want to highlight some incredible toys that are designed from the ground-up with feminine interests at heart, and are marketed to draw in these audiences  :)

If you've read my blog before, you know by now that I'm a fan of Shark Tank. So let's start with a company that had its big debut on their show: 
Roominate offers adorable building-kits designed by 2 female engineers from Stanford. They have a variety of doll houses, a helicopter kit, and other open-ended options that can be constructed. The kits include motor and light circuitry to integrate into the structures, making it fun for girls to develop STEM interests & skills through creative play.

A similar company was started by a prior Stanford graduate, Debbie Sterling, to help promote a wide range of STEM skill development among young girls. GoldieBlox offers a wider variety of activities, including different types of structural engineering projects, various types of play-sets, as well as experiments like the awesome "movie machine" shown to the left.
In their promotional materials they state: "Construction toys help develop an early interest in STEM, but for far too long they've been considered 'boys toys'. We believe there are millions of girls out there who are engineers. They just don't know it yet." Debbie has famously said that when she first told her mom that she wanted to be an engineer, her mom said "eww why?!" She hopes to help other girls become interested in this fabulous career path... to break the both stereotype as well as the statistic that 86% of the engineers in the world are men.

There is another neat product from Build & Imagine with a simpler construction framework. It is comprised of magnetic building-segments that piece together into an interchangeable and ever-changing doll house that leaves almost everything up to the imagination of the builder! The pieces themselves are stackable and magnetically connected... plus it comes with little magnetically-adherent accessories and decorations to really make the space your own, with a type of interactivity that feels almost like high-tech paper dolls or a felt-board set.

And have you heard of Hopscotch or tried it yet?
Not the game where you jump to on the sidewalk.... the coding program.
Hopscotch is an app that was created to help kids build their own apps through an easy-to-use interface that requires no coding-knowledge but which can teach rudimentary coding-skills along the way.
Hopscotch was started by 2 female co-founders who developed it to help direct young girls' interests & skills towards the field of technology. They say that from what they can tell, their app users are about 50/50 in male-to-female ratio. But during the Digital Kids Conference, the most interesting thing that they shared was their experience with the early user-acquisition process. They had started out by asking girls if they wanted to learn how to code - but it was hard to get much excitement going when they approached girls with this question. So they thought about what girls traditionally like to do... things like knitting, crafting, coloring, and other types of creating... so they shifted their approach. They started to ask girls instead, "Would you like to make your own app?" in order to appeal to their sense of creativity and baseline desire to make things. With this shift in perspective, they noticed many more girls signing on to create their own app than to "learn how to code" ... and Hopscotch has become wildly popular since the company was founded in 2011!

These are just a few examples of the wide shift that we are seeing in the toy industry, and it is expected to continue to expand in this direction as families demonstrate their desire to have more science, technology, math, and engineering toys that also have strong feminine appeal. 

Our next blog post in the series will explore the fascinating combination of traditional real-world play that can now be enhanced through integration with digital-play experiences - so stay tuned for more from Tiny Tastes World on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram or sign up to receive posts in the right side-bar of our blog!

Yours,
Tiny


Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com


More about STEM:

Were any of these your favorite subject in school?

Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics

There are some surprising facts about STEM careers that the toy industry is trying to help turn around....
According to surveys of teenagers entering college, only about 15% of females want to declare a STEM major compared to 40% of their male counterparts. 

Trends in girls' interest within the STEM careers have been plotted by STEMconnector:

I was interviewing a friend who is a developer to understand why he became interested in learning how to code. He said "I grew up playing computer games, was obsessed with video games, and was always curious about how these things were made even from a young age. When I got the opportunity to learn how to code, I had a real appreciation for it because I knew all of the incredible applications that could be developed from a code-base and I wanted to be a part of that creative process." 

Now take a look at the chart again - even within the STEM majors, the majority of these girls are interested in pursuing science careers (e.g. biology, chemistry) much more than technology, engineering, or mathematics. Science is absolutely fabulous, no doubt! But the question is, how can we also foster an appreciation for technology and these other STEM areas in young girls. Technology has been increasing in overall prevalence since 1997, but during that same time period surveys have shown a decrease in girls' interest to enter a technology career. Thoughts?