I like it, but I can't help but feel that the toy is sort of limited in the mechanics it can teach. :/
GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
61–70 of 113 posts
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Do they make pink girly legos?" Why yes, yes they do: http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx They're controversial for the same reasons people are complaining on this thread, but they're selling. (See http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/09/lego-friends-tr... )
My experience is limited to sisters, but they played with the normal legos just as much as I did. I suspect these would have been a hit. Users care about things like color far more than engineers often suspect. If changing the color makes a substantive improvement to outcomes you care about - change the color.
I think there's a bit more to this toy than simply 'pink it and shrink it' as they say in retail.
The story + building is the innovation - meeting girls where they are and presenting construction/engineering themes through something other than a jumble of Legos. (This coming from a girl who loved Legos but didn't end up as an engineer)
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
My girls LOVE legos. They have a few of the new 'pink' ones but mostly play with our 20 year old lego collection. They don't think of the girly legos as 'real legos', for whatever reason. It _is_ disheartening to go into a lego store and see almost solely boy-oriented sets, though. I note kids in Lego stores are roughly 60/40 boys / girls, but the sets are boyish.
Some of us find it disheartening that Lego makes "sets" at all. What happened to kids using their imaginations?
Even with the sets there is still learning involved in lego or at least skill/work involved for some(the same people with the imagination before I would imagine). I'm young enough that I grew up with lego sets(actually I grew up with construx and built many a string controlled robot with them!) my favourites were the pirates ones and I still have them in a big box at my parents house. The lego sets I had came with a set of instructions on how to build whatever they were for. But the booklets also came with 4 or 5 pictures of other projects built with the same or a subset of the same parts but no details on how to make them. I admit I wasn't imagining a new thing and building it but I would always work out how to build what they showed and I learned a lot from that too.
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#64Why not call it "GoldieBlox: The Cute Engineering Toy"? Why enforce gender roles? Isn't the title kind of saying "Girls like cute stuff, boys don't ever like cute stuff, and the only way to get girls interested in engineering is to make it cute"? Couldn't we get females into engineering more easily if we stopped culturally delegating "cool" to little boys and "cute" to little girls?
[Or the real solution, just stop having gender identification entirely, but that's a ways away]
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#65Note: not all girls need pink and frills to love engineering toys, building things, or even LEGO. My 8yo daughter loves to tear apart electronics for the components and build new things, and so do several of her friends. I get that she's not "typical", but I'm not sure that the problem is that LEGO and Erector are "for boys". I lean towards thinking that the problem is that we tell kids that, one way or another.
Not all girls do, but some do. GoldieBlox seems to be for the ones that do.
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see the concerns some people have with legos clearly focusing on marketing to boys, but erector set stuff does seem rather un-gendered to me. I don't know if it has changed, but the erector set stuff I had as a child was just a bunch of stamped out metal parts with nuts/bolts. Not much "themeing" at all. I suppose you can just buy "vanilla" lego blocks too of course. Anyway, parents know what their kids want mo…
If anything, the kids may not care, but adults picking out toys for a little girl will feel more comfortable buying this. People are always happier if they feel their choices were more "customized" for the person they're buying for. Personal anecdote: when I was a girl I wanted this $50 erector set for Christmas which my dad said was too expensive, but then he bought me a some $50 stuffed animal for Christmas anyways…
Isn't that gender-marketing to the point where you don't even listen to what your kids want but get things based on what they should be liking?
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#67I really hope that when I have kids, their interests and my location coincide so I don't have to buy them a Toy for Gender. I'd like to let them find out what they like to do.
Odds are, they'll want a Toy for Gender. It's not 100% and I would never push my kids to have a particular type of toy, but gender differences are real. I have four kids. I've bought many toys that matched stereotypes and several that didn't match. What surprised me the most was, even when we didn't buy toy guns or swords, my boys turned things into them; and no matter what game was being played (and how violent the…
Part of that could still be marketing; the commercials they seen on TV, online. Girls are princesses. Boys are knights. It's not like every kid is free of things like that.
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#68This is actually the first kickstarter project I've tossed in for. My only regret is that it won't be ready for Christmas. I have 4 young female relatives at the moment that I'd love to get interested in engineering. Two of them already have good starts but all could use a fun toy to really bring out the interest. I'm not buying it to try to convince them to be engineers either, I'd just like all of them to have a fun technical toy to play with like the ones I remember fondly as a kid. Does it need to be girl specific? Nope, but I think it will help.
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of us find it disheartening that Lego makes "sets" at all. What happened to kids using their imaginations?
Even with the sets there is still learning involved in lego or at least skill/work involved for some(the same people with the imagination before I would imagine). I'm young enough that I grew up with lego sets(actually I grew up with construx and built many a string controlled robot with them!) my favourites were the pirates ones and I still have them in a big box at my parents house. The lego sets I had came with a…
The big problem is the movie-themed sets where all the children do is reconstruct scenes from a movie, instead of using their imagination to create novel scenes.
Re: GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls
#70I think this very in depth look at the history of gender targeting in Legos will help anyone think through these tough issues...
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/01/lego-gender-part-1-...
A key critique of what Legos have become is that they enforce oppressive gender roles - boys build fire trucks; girls build hair salons - and that goes much deeper than the color of the blocks.
To my eyes, this toy looks empowering.