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GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls

135 points by tlrobinson 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
eridius 14y ago
I can't figure out if this is a good idea because it encourages girls to explore traditionally male-dominated activities, or a bad thing because it reinforces the idea that traditional construction toys are intended for boys.
- TWAndrews 14y ago
  I think it accepts the fact that traditional engineering toys are boy oriented, and adds a girl oriented toy to the market. Seems less about changing prevailing attitudes and more about using presenting cool stuff about engineering to girls who have probably already been impacted by those attitudes. In any case, I signed up for a couple boxes for my daughters.
- Rolo0321 14y ago
  Agree with TWAndrews. At the end of the day, if there are girls out there who would not be interested in playing with the boy-oriented sets but WOULD be interested in playing with GoldieBlox, and from there learn that engineering is cool - then the toy accomplished what it set out to do.
- im3w1l 14y ago
  This seems to be a problem of "too much theory, too little data".
bunderbunder 14y ago
I'm somewhat reminded of an ill-fated attempt by the European Commission to attract girls to science with a music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA
- Rolo0321 14y ago
  I will file this music video under 'So Bad It's Good'. Almost died laughing. Thank you for sharing.
- im3w1l 14y ago
  Of course, we have no idea if it would have worked, since it was pulled so quickly. I think it would have.
timr 14y ago
I get the desire for narrative and different colors...but this looks awfully simple-minded. Why can a boy age 5-9 play with erector sets and legos, but a "girl's" engineering toy must comprise such a primitive set of components?
- jlgreco 14y ago
  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 more than anyone else, so I think the option of gendered construction toys is great (so long as the market doesn't become dominated by them).
  - Tichy 14y ago
    That's what I get for switching from watching =3 to HN: can't help thinking that maybe that kit would sell better to girls if it wasn't called "erector set".
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Ha, that never occurred to me before. "Erector Sets" sold in the us are actually rebranded "Meccano". I'm not sure when that change happened, but it seems like that is what I actually had. I guess they bought the brand for marketing reasons.
  - egillie 14y ago
    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. I guess he felt like it was a better gift.
sthatipamala 14y ago
I couldn't figure out from the video what the "game dynamic" is of this toy. I see that one arranges the spindles so that the animals spin when the ribbon is pulled. Is the pattern a puzzle for the kids to solve? Do the kids follow along based on the patterns shown in the story? Either way, exciting concept. I wish they explained the game itself though.
- Rolo0321 14y ago
  The ribbon is actually a functional belt drive. It starts with spinning one animal/spindle, then builds up to spinning all five at once, the way a belt drive would. For more info:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/09/can-a-kids-toy-bring-more-women-into-engineering/262373/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/09/can-a-ki...
jpxxx 14y ago
Can't hate, I love it. Even the pink and cuddly bits. If this product instead had a blue ribbon and alien figurines with the title "Cyber Drivetrain Blast Kit" it wouldn't raise an eyebrow as a gendered or pandering toy. Legos are for boys when 95% of what's on the Lego shelf is boy pirates, boy laserbros, boy Batman, boy bio-alien-robots tearing the shit out of boy bio-dino-robots, etc.
- vessenes 14y ago
  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.
  - scoot 14y ago
    Your girls love Lego. So does mine, and houses, shops, cars figures, vehicles - the bulk of the Lego staple kits - are all gender neutral.
  - Turing_Machine 14y ago
    Some of us find it disheartening that Lego makes "sets" at all. What happened to kids using their imaginations?
    - sanswork 14y ago
      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.
Tichy 14y ago
The idea to combine it with a story sounds great. Perhaps it would also work with classic toys, that is just write stories that use Lego, and skip the new toy? Some examples as to what you can build with the toy would be great.
pnathan 14y ago
I 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.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  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 boys wanted it to be :/), one of my girls always wanted to be the stereotypical girl (the other is a very interesting mix of incredibly girly and not). We tried very hard to not overly bias our kids, but the bias is in their genetic code. What I like about this toy is it recognizes that while providing a creative play experience. There are few girl's toys that allow you to build something. The bigger question: do the girls want it? My guess is that they do. Not all of them, but enough to make this kind of toy successful.
  - azakai 14y ago
    > We tried very hard to not overly bias our kids, but the bias is in their genetic code. Maybe you didn't mean this literally, but I think it's important not to promote this as-yet-unproven notion. There are tantalizing studies with conflicting conclusions here - we just don't know how much gender-stereotypical behavior is genetic.
  - JabavuAdams 14y ago
    There are differences, but so much is socialization. I.e. if green were a traditional girls' colour, and marketed as such, then girly girls would want to play with green toys. Parents would subtly encourage boys not to play with green toys. Robots etc. are not inherently violent so an interest in / lack of interest in (non-weaponized) robots is better explained by socialization, rather than gender differences, IMHO.
  - shurane 14y ago
ck2 14y ago
Building what you see on the video is very clever.
alanfalcon 14y ago
One step closer to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Stephenson's Diamond Age. I approve.
bunkat 14y ago
I think the toy is pretty cool and I'm sure lots of little girls will enjoy playing with it, but I'm not sure how this is supposed to get girls interested in engineering. There are none of the aspects of legos and erector sets that make those toys a stepping stone to becoming an engineer. Legos let you build whatever you can imagine, including things like houses, bridges, buildings, cars, planes, etc that exist in the real world. This allows little kids to emulate real engineers which is critical to creating excitement in the discipline. It also promotes skills like math (2x4 blocks = 8 dots), physics (how tall can you go before it falls over, where should wheels be to make a car stable), symmetry, organization (keeping 3000 parts in order), and instruction comprehension. I don't see any of that with a toy where you put a ribbon around 5 spools. It's almost like saying Easy Bake Ovens create more female chefs. Thing is, they don't. Girls that spend lots of time in the kitchen building skills and creating on their own become chefs, not girls that put brownies under a light bulb. I also thought it was funny that they couldn't even move away from the Barbie syndrome. Can't girls have any other role models than blonde hair, blue eyed, thin Caucasian women?
- wtracy 14y ago
  You highlighted my main concern with this toy: It's not nearly as open-ended as "traditional" building toys.
  - bunkat 14y ago
    Not only is this set not as open-ended, I'm not sure buying additional sets will improve things since it sounds like every set will be rather self contained.
antihero 14y ago
I initially made a more crass comment, and then deleted to it, but what I'll say is that this got my feminist heckles up, and it seems like a pragmatic approach. However, in this case the pragmatic approach seems like building a castle on a swamp, as opposed to making any attempt to deal with said swamp. Give girls lego.
- polemic 14y ago
  > "building a castle on a swamp" Perfectly put. My nearly-3 daughter loves megablocks and is getting into lego. I don't see any need whatsoever to get the 'gendered' version, especially stuff that is artificially simplified in the name of being 'girl friendly'. The best way that I know of not inflicting the gender biases onto my child from a young age, is to NOT DO IT MYSELF. I mean, really, if parents aren't able to filter the marketing BS, how are children supposed to do it?
- oneandoneis2 14y ago
  Other kings said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em!
languagehacker 14y ago
Interesting! The spools and ribbons are almost skeuomorphic in that toy's context, but still attractive under the existing girls' toy aesthetic. Smart idea.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  Now we're applying the word 'skeuomorphic' back to real world objects? The sky is the limit for this new expression. Will it reach inception-esque levels?
  - Tipzntrix 14y ago
    Yeah, what does skeuomorphic mean here, its interface is made to imitate a real world drive belt? I hope it would be, if it's supposed to be an engineering toy.
connor 14y ago
Creating a more appealing activity for girls seems like a good step. An even better step might be trying to fix perceptions regarding the engineering centric activities out there for kids (lego mindstorms, fort building, etc). Right now this solution feels like similar solutions being pursued in computer engineering to fix the gender imbalance- namely creating girls-only coding groups. This is good in some ways, but I feel like it breeds two standards (with the female standard being weaker). For me, the best type of progress is girls working alongside the boys, with both happy and comfortable.
cullenking 14y ago
All the naysayers out there are neglecting an important viewpoint best explained by a personal anecdote. I have a 4 year old niece that is so into princesses, pink, high heals, the whole 9 yards, that any present that isn't themed pink and girly will just get ignored, yet she's very smart and likes playing with puzzles. Something like this might actually work for her, where gender neutral legos or erector sets would never get played with.
- grueful 14y ago
  My knee-jerk response to that: Do they make pink girly legos? Maybe there are reasons why that's the wrong approach, but I tend to regard interaction and packaging as two very distinct design components. If the packaging is the problem, fix that first. Changing the interaction should come second. Dumbing it down is almost never the solution, yet it's often the first solution people turn to when trying to deal with a gender gap. It's as if they think the issues will go away if they speak very slowly and loudly. (I admire the objective, but I believe I would like the project better if it said "an engineering toy" instead of "the engineering toy." The implication differs.)
  - bjt 14y ago
    "Do they make pink girly legos?" Why yes, yes they do: http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx 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-triples-sales-to-girls-despite-feminist-critique/. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/09/lego-friends-tr...)
    - grueful 14y ago
      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.
neilk 14y ago
Good intentions yes, but is this even fun? She says she playtested it, but I can't imagine it holding anyone's attention for more than an hour. Maybe you can re-play it by reading the story again, though. Tangent: I've had an idea for a while that the best way to teach girls programming would be to start not with math or games but with a chat server. You can handwave over how the networking works, with the right framework. And kids who are really interested can delve deeper. Maybe kids reared on that would learn TCP/IP before they ever had to slog through some dreary fibonacci exercise.
mkramlich 14y ago
Wow. $100k pledged. For proposing to do something that LEGO's Pink sets are essentially already doing today, on the shelves, ready to buy. Kickstarter is getting frothy. Reminds me of all the swill that was earning millions in the early days of the iOS App Store.
mkramlich 14y ago
Now if we could solve the other great crime against humanity: why aren't there more dressup dolls and baby toys aimed at boys? That gender-biased oppression has got to end.
- peteretep 14y ago
  Have you thought about writing to the Lego corp and suggesting inch-high dolls? You could give them things like interchangeable heads and hair, or even legs. Maybe even tiny little hands that can grip on to things? I guess you could even do them themed ... pirates, knights, soldiers. Amazed Lego have never considered doing miniature dress up dolls for boys before. You could call them ... Hrm ... Lego Men? But I guess that's not all! Think about all the fun people could have with dress up soldiers! "Men of Action", or, gee, "Joe who's a GI". You could give him a whole range of accessories and outfits and and and...
  - mkramlich 14y ago
    Dressup dolls != action figures or LEGO figs. By dressup dolls I thought I clearly conveyed the idea of dolls whose design and accessories are all about dressing them up with clothing, makeup and fashion accessories. Not guns. Not tools. Not Batman-like gadgets/vehicles. Dressup dolls. Think Barbie dolls. The point being that dressup dolls and babies appeals to a large percentage of (but not necessarily all) actual real-life girls whereas action figures and guns appeal to a large percentage of (but not necessarily all) actual real-life boys. But you don't see people complaining about the lack of the latter for girls. "Why aren't there more toy Glocks marketed for girls like my little Suzy?" - a concerned suburban mom, nowhere
    - simon 14y ago
      This is because however politically incorrect it is to point out, that girls and boys are different in basic fundamental temperaments. Boys play competitive games where they either compete against each other or work together to overcome an objective. That's how my brother and I played back in the day. And growing up in the UK, we played with Action Men rather than GI Joe's. Now, I have two daughters and they play cooperative games. The best description of girls playing that I've heard is "lets". I've heard my daughters playing together and they say "let's ..." all the time. They role-play scenarios with their Barbie dolls. And before they had Barbies, they did it with their stuffed animals. I'm a pastor and they often re-enact church and family stuff. They get details exactly right, including the pastor (me) working on his sermon on his laptop. I have not forced this behavior on my daughters. And they like a few activities not normally associated with girls. My oldest likes shooting, has her own .22 rifle and is a pretty good shot. They both like wearing camo much to my wife's distress. They do play with lego and mega-blocks. My oldest has an Ubuntu laptop and loves it. But most of the time, they play traditional girls stuff.
kylemaxwell 14y ago
Note: 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.
- Rolo0321 14y ago
  Not all girls do, but some do. GoldieBlox seems to be for the ones that do.
labizaboffle 14y ago
Mixed reaction. As a father of two daughters, this makes me sick. I'm not a feminist, but I can't stand when people make "things for girls" that are pastel-ly and have ribbons. That does not help them, unless it is clothing or accessories. To make girls want to play with tinkertoys, you make... tinkertoys. My youngest- she loves guns and trucks. I don't even own a gun or a truck! Unfortunately, McDonalds sells "girl toys" and "boy toys". That makes me sick too. But they know their market. So- I think it is a good thing. There is a place for almost every toy. Just not with my daughters.
- cadamez 14y ago
  Younger me was in the same boat as your youngest daughter. It's almost as if girls don't get to have individual personalities and tastes; they have to be a Marketed Monolithic Girl Consumer.
- roguecoder 14y ago
  The solution isn't to expect girls to play with toys that were designed and marketed specifically for boys, as tinker toys were and are. At least, not without putting the same onus on little boys. If boys were eager to play with pink tinker toys, after all, they would already exist.
DannoHung 14y ago
I like it, but I can't help but feel that the toy is sort of limited in the mechanics it can teach. :/
ttttannebaum 14y ago
Why 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]
- Tipzntrix 14y ago
  I think the answer to this has been no, females won't go into engineering more no matter how you culturally delegate personality attributes. Consider the sales of the toys and the admissions rates into engineering programs DESPITE the fact that more women are being admitted to university than men [1], and yet still engineering programs are 80-20 male-female[2], despite the gender neutrality motions taking place and the fact that it's no longer the 50s with openly sexist TV commercials and advertisements. [1]: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-503-x/2010001/article/11542-eng.htm http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-503-x/2010001/article/11542-... [2]: http://theblueandwhite.ca/article/2011/03/09/19/47/52/something-wrong-with-the-sex-ratio.html http://theblueandwhite.ca/article/2011/03/09/19/47/52/someth...
  - ttttannebaum 14y ago
    What gender neutrality motions are taking place? Specifically at the level of childhood environments and teachings?
    - Tipzntrix 14y ago
      Parents not buying gendered clothes or discussing their child's gender until after birth, texts using "she" as often as "he" or occasionally neither at all. Overall there's more of that social push than there ever was (perhaps because there was none at all). In fact, there's even a school in Sweden that went hardline on this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/primaryeducation/9340632/Primary-schools-praised-for-labelling-four-year-olds-transgender.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/primaryeducation/934063...
sanswork 14y ago
This 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.
binaryseed 14y ago
I 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-lego-friends/ 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.
- icebraining 14y ago
  How could Lego gone so wrong. In 1981: http://www.thekidworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Lego-ad.jpg http://www.thekidworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Leg...
  - vidarh 14y ago
    They've gone so "wrong" because they've been chasing sales. And it's working - the newest "Lego Friends" range is massively outselling their expectations. So don't blame Lego - they're not the ones deciding what people actually want to buy.
brennenHN 14y ago
So I really like this idea, and I get the need to fit the tool into the social context, but it still feels a little bit problematic in its labeling.
modernerd 14y ago
GoldieBlox is exactly the sort of project that Kickstarter should be used for. Stories like, "I'm a talented engineer who's identified a real problem and used my life savings to develop a prototype that could fix it; I've tested it rigorously and gotten great feedback. Now I just need your cash to put in my first order of 5,000 sets." are easy to get behind. Stories like "We've got an idea that seems pretty neat, and we'd like your cash to help us support ourselves while we flesh it out a bit; without your money we'll probably just make a few sacrifices, live a little less comfortably, and build it in our spare time anyway." are harder to rally behind. Both of the female engineers I know got into engineering because their parents were engineers. It would be great to see people with more diverse sources of inspiration entering the field, and toys like GoldieBlox could be a great step in this direction.
mibbitier 14y ago
This looks awful. Buy some Lego instead.
drhowarddrfine 14y ago
Guaranteed: this product will go nowhere due to a lack of sales and interest.
trhtrsh 14y ago
Holy cow, the heroine/model image with impossibly skinny limbs undermines the entire project.
meej 14y ago
Thirty years ago, when I was a six year old little girl, I had these: http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=400-1 http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=400-1 http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=402-1 http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=402-1 They were my favorite. It never occurred to me that they were for boys, and I don't think anyone else tried to tell me that, either. I loved building houses and hotels with my universal building sets and for a long time they fueled dreams of being an architect, until I discovered engineering. I know there has always been some gendering of toys, but I feel like we've regressed from where we were as a society when I was a child, and it's terribly depressing.

135 points by tlrobinson 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

I can't figure out if this is a good idea because it encourages girls to explore traditionally male-dominated activities, or a bad thing because it reinforces the idea that traditional construction toys are intended for boys.

TWAndrews 14y ago
I think it accepts the fact that traditional engineering toys are boy oriented, and adds a girl oriented toy to the market. Seems less about changing prevailing attitudes and more about using presenting cool stuff about engineering to girls who have probably already been impacted by those attitudes. In any case, I signed up for a couple boxes for my daughters.
Rolo0321 14y ago
Agree with TWAndrews. At the end of the day, if there are girls out there who would not be interested in playing with the boy-oriented sets but WOULD be interested in playing with GoldieBlox, and from there learn that engineering is cool - then the toy accomplished what it set out to do.
im3w1l 14y ago
This seems to be a problem of "too much theory, too little data".

bunderbunder 14y ago

I'm somewhat reminded of an ill-fated attempt by the European Commission to attract girls to science with a music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA

Rolo0321 14y ago
I will file this music video under 'So Bad It's Good'. Almost died laughing. Thank you for sharing.
im3w1l 14y ago
Of course, we have no idea if it would have worked, since it was pulled so quickly. I think it would have.

timr 14y ago

I get the desire for narrative and different colors...but this looks awfully simple-minded. Why can a boy age 5-9 play with erector sets and legos, but a "girl's" engineering toy must comprise such a primitive set of components?

jlgreco 14y ago
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 more than anyone else, so I think the option of gendered construction toys is great (so long as the market doesn't become dominated by them).
- Tichy 14y ago
  That's what I get for switching from watching =3 to HN: can't help thinking that maybe that kit would sell better to girls if it wasn't called "erector set".
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Ha, that never occurred to me before. "Erector Sets" sold in the us are actually rebranded "Meccano". I'm not sure when that change happened, but it seems like that is what I actually had. I guess they bought the brand for marketing reasons.
- egillie 14y ago
  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. I guess he felt like it was a better gift.

sthatipamala 14y ago

I couldn't figure out from the video what the "game dynamic" is of this toy. I see that one arranges the spindles so that the animals spin when the ribbon is pulled. Is the pattern a puzzle for the kids to solve? Do the kids follow along based on the patterns shown in the story? Either way, exciting concept. I wish they explained the game itself though.

Rolo0321 14y ago
The ribbon is actually a functional belt drive. It starts with spinning one animal/spindle, then builds up to spinning all five at once, the way a belt drive would. For more info:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/09/can-a-kids-toy-bring-more-women-into-engineering/262373/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/09/can-a-ki...

jpxxx 14y ago

Can't hate, I love it. Even the pink and cuddly bits. If this product instead had a blue ribbon and alien figurines with the title "Cyber Drivetrain Blast Kit" it wouldn't raise an eyebrow as a gendered or pandering toy. Legos are for boys when 95% of what's on the Lego shelf is boy pirates, boy laserbros, boy Batman, boy bio-alien-robots tearing the shit out of boy bio-dino-robots, etc.

vessenes 14y ago
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.
- scoot 14y ago
  Your girls love Lego. So does mine, and houses, shops, cars figures, vehicles - the bulk of the Lego staple kits - are all gender neutral.
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  Some of us find it disheartening that Lego makes "sets" at all. What happened to kids using their imaginations?
  - sanswork 14y ago
    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.

Tichy 14y ago

The idea to combine it with a story sounds great. Perhaps it would also work with classic toys, that is just write stories that use Lego, and skip the new toy? Some examples as to what you can build with the toy would be great.

pnathan 14y ago

I 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.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
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 boys wanted it to be :/), one of my girls always wanted to be the stereotypical girl (the other is a very interesting mix of incredibly girly and not). We tried very hard to not overly bias our kids, but the bias is in their genetic code. What I like about this toy is it recognizes that while providing a creative play experience. There are few girl's toys that allow you to build something. The bigger question: do the girls want it? My guess is that they do. Not all of them, but enough to make this kind of toy successful.
- azakai 14y ago
  > We tried very hard to not overly bias our kids, but the bias is in their genetic code. Maybe you didn't mean this literally, but I think it's important not to promote this as-yet-unproven notion. There are tantalizing studies with conflicting conclusions here - we just don't know how much gender-stereotypical behavior is genetic.
- JabavuAdams 14y ago
  There are differences, but so much is socialization. I.e. if green were a traditional girls' colour, and marketed as such, then girly girls would want to play with green toys. Parents would subtly encourage boys not to play with green toys. Robots etc. are not inherently violent so an interest in / lack of interest in (non-weaponized) robots is better explained by socialization, rather than gender differences, IMHO.
- shurane 14y ago

ck2 14y ago

Building what you see on the video is very clever.

alanfalcon 14y ago

One step closer to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Stephenson's Diamond Age. I approve.

bunkat 14y ago

I think the toy is pretty cool and I'm sure lots of little girls will enjoy playing with it, but I'm not sure how this is supposed to get girls interested in engineering. There are none of the aspects of legos and erector sets that make those toys a stepping stone to becoming an engineer. Legos let you build whatever you can imagine, including things like houses, bridges, buildings, cars, planes, etc that exist in the real world. This allows little kids to emulate real engineers which is critical to creating excitement in the discipline. It also promotes skills like math (2x4 blocks = 8 dots), physics (how tall can you go before it falls over, where should wheels be to make a car stable), symmetry, organization (keeping 3000 parts in order), and instruction comprehension. I don't see any of that with a toy where you put a ribbon around 5 spools. It's almost like saying Easy Bake Ovens create more female chefs. Thing is, they don't. Girls that spend lots of time in the kitchen building skills and creating on their own become chefs, not girls that put brownies under a light bulb. I also thought it was funny that they couldn't even move away from the Barbie syndrome. Can't girls have any other role models than blonde hair, blue eyed, thin Caucasian women?

wtracy 14y ago
You highlighted my main concern with this toy: It's not nearly as open-ended as "traditional" building toys.
- bunkat 14y ago
  Not only is this set not as open-ended, I'm not sure buying additional sets will improve things since it sounds like every set will be rather self contained.

antihero 14y ago

I initially made a more crass comment, and then deleted to it, but what I'll say is that this got my feminist heckles up, and it seems like a pragmatic approach. However, in this case the pragmatic approach seems like building a castle on a swamp, as opposed to making any attempt to deal with said swamp. Give girls lego.

polemic 14y ago
> "building a castle on a swamp" Perfectly put. My nearly-3 daughter loves megablocks and is getting into lego. I don't see any need whatsoever to get the 'gendered' version, especially stuff that is artificially simplified in the name of being 'girl friendly'. The best way that I know of not inflicting the gender biases onto my child from a young age, is to NOT DO IT MYSELF. I mean, really, if parents aren't able to filter the marketing BS, how are children supposed to do it?
oneandoneis2 14y ago
Other kings said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em!

languagehacker 14y ago

Interesting! The spools and ribbons are almost skeuomorphic in that toy's context, but still attractive under the existing girls' toy aesthetic. Smart idea.

DeepDuh 14y ago
Now we're applying the word 'skeuomorphic' back to real world objects? The sky is the limit for this new expression. Will it reach inception-esque levels?
- Tipzntrix 14y ago
  Yeah, what does skeuomorphic mean here, its interface is made to imitate a real world drive belt? I hope it would be, if it's supposed to be an engineering toy.

connor 14y ago

Creating a more appealing activity for girls seems like a good step. An even better step might be trying to fix perceptions regarding the engineering centric activities out there for kids (lego mindstorms, fort building, etc). Right now this solution feels like similar solutions being pursued in computer engineering to fix the gender imbalance- namely creating girls-only coding groups. This is good in some ways, but I feel like it breeds two standards (with the female standard being weaker). For me, the best type of progress is girls working alongside the boys, with both happy and comfortable.

cullenking 14y ago

All the naysayers out there are neglecting an important viewpoint best explained by a personal anecdote. I have a 4 year old niece that is so into princesses, pink, high heals, the whole 9 yards, that any present that isn't themed pink and girly will just get ignored, yet she's very smart and likes playing with puzzles. Something like this might actually work for her, where gender neutral legos or erector sets would never get played with.

grueful 14y ago
My knee-jerk response to that: Do they make pink girly legos? Maybe there are reasons why that's the wrong approach, but I tend to regard interaction and packaging as two very distinct design components. If the packaging is the problem, fix that first. Changing the interaction should come second. Dumbing it down is almost never the solution, yet it's often the first solution people turn to when trying to deal with a gender gap. It's as if they think the issues will go away if they speak very slowly and loudly. (I admire the objective, but I believe I would like the project better if it said "an engineering toy" instead of "the engineering toy." The implication differs.)
- bjt 14y ago
  "Do they make pink girly legos?" Why yes, yes they do: http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx 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-triples-sales-to-girls-despite-feminist-critique/. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/09/lego-friends-tr...)
  - grueful 14y ago
    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.

neilk 14y ago

Good intentions yes, but is this even fun? She says she playtested it, but I can't imagine it holding anyone's attention for more than an hour. Maybe you can re-play it by reading the story again, though. Tangent: I've had an idea for a while that the best way to teach girls programming would be to start not with math or games but with a chat server. You can handwave over how the networking works, with the right framework. And kids who are really interested can delve deeper. Maybe kids reared on that would learn TCP/IP before they ever had to slog through some dreary fibonacci exercise.

mkramlich 14y ago

Wow. $100k pledged. For proposing to do something that LEGO's Pink sets are essentially already doing today, on the shelves, ready to buy. Kickstarter is getting frothy. Reminds me of all the swill that was earning millions in the early days of the iOS App Store.

mkramlich 14y ago

Now if we could solve the other great crime against humanity: why aren't there more dressup dolls and baby toys aimed at boys? That gender-biased oppression has got to end.

peteretep 14y ago
Have you thought about writing to the Lego corp and suggesting inch-high dolls? You could give them things like interchangeable heads and hair, or even legs. Maybe even tiny little hands that can grip on to things? I guess you could even do them themed ... pirates, knights, soldiers. Amazed Lego have never considered doing miniature dress up dolls for boys before. You could call them ... Hrm ... Lego Men? But I guess that's not all! Think about all the fun people could have with dress up soldiers! "Men of Action", or, gee, "Joe who's a GI". You could give him a whole range of accessories and outfits and and and...
- mkramlich 14y ago
  Dressup dolls != action figures or LEGO figs. By dressup dolls I thought I clearly conveyed the idea of dolls whose design and accessories are all about dressing them up with clothing, makeup and fashion accessories. Not guns. Not tools. Not Batman-like gadgets/vehicles. Dressup dolls. Think Barbie dolls. The point being that dressup dolls and babies appeals to a large percentage of (but not necessarily all) actual real-life girls whereas action figures and guns appeal to a large percentage of (but not necessarily all) actual real-life boys. But you don't see people complaining about the lack of the latter for girls. "Why aren't there more toy Glocks marketed for girls like my little Suzy?" - a concerned suburban mom, nowhere
  - simon 14y ago
    This is because however politically incorrect it is to point out, that girls and boys are different in basic fundamental temperaments. Boys play competitive games where they either compete against each other or work together to overcome an objective. That's how my brother and I played back in the day. And growing up in the UK, we played with Action Men rather than GI Joe's. Now, I have two daughters and they play cooperative games. The best description of girls playing that I've heard is "lets". I've heard my daughters playing together and they say "let's ..." all the time. They role-play scenarios with their Barbie dolls. And before they had Barbies, they did it with their stuffed animals. I'm a pastor and they often re-enact church and family stuff. They get details exactly right, including the pastor (me) working on his sermon on his laptop. I have not forced this behavior on my daughters. And they like a few activities not normally associated with girls. My oldest likes shooting, has her own .22 rifle and is a pretty good shot. They both like wearing camo much to my wife's distress. They do play with lego and mega-blocks. My oldest has an Ubuntu laptop and loves it. But most of the time, they play traditional girls stuff.

kylemaxwell 14y ago

Note: 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.

Rolo0321 14y ago
Not all girls do, but some do. GoldieBlox seems to be for the ones that do.

labizaboffle 14y ago

Mixed reaction. As a father of two daughters, this makes me sick. I'm not a feminist, but I can't stand when people make "things for girls" that are pastel-ly and have ribbons. That does not help them, unless it is clothing or accessories. To make girls want to play with tinkertoys, you make... tinkertoys. My youngest- she loves guns and trucks. I don't even own a gun or a truck! Unfortunately, McDonalds sells "girl toys" and "boy toys". That makes me sick too. But they know their market. So- I think it is a good thing. There is a place for almost every toy. Just not with my daughters.

cadamez 14y ago
Younger me was in the same boat as your youngest daughter. It's almost as if girls don't get to have individual personalities and tastes; they have to be a Marketed Monolithic Girl Consumer.
roguecoder 14y ago
The solution isn't to expect girls to play with toys that were designed and marketed specifically for boys, as tinker toys were and are. At least, not without putting the same onus on little boys. If boys were eager to play with pink tinker toys, after all, they would already exist.

DannoHung 14y ago

I like it, but I can't help but feel that the toy is sort of limited in the mechanics it can teach. :/

ttttannebaum 14y ago

Why 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]

Tipzntrix 14y ago
I think the answer to this has been no, females won't go into engineering more no matter how you culturally delegate personality attributes. Consider the sales of the toys and the admissions rates into engineering programs DESPITE the fact that more women are being admitted to university than men [1], and yet still engineering programs are 80-20 male-female[2], despite the gender neutrality motions taking place and the fact that it's no longer the 50s with openly sexist TV commercials and advertisements. [1]: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-503-x/2010001/article/11542-eng.htm http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-503-x/2010001/article/11542-... [2]: http://theblueandwhite.ca/article/2011/03/09/19/47/52/something-wrong-with-the-sex-ratio.html http://theblueandwhite.ca/article/2011/03/09/19/47/52/someth...
- ttttannebaum 14y ago
  What gender neutrality motions are taking place? Specifically at the level of childhood environments and teachings?
  - Tipzntrix 14y ago
    Parents not buying gendered clothes or discussing their child's gender until after birth, texts using "she" as often as "he" or occasionally neither at all. Overall there's more of that social push than there ever was (perhaps because there was none at all). In fact, there's even a school in Sweden that went hardline on this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/primaryeducation/9340632/Primary-schools-praised-for-labelling-four-year-olds-transgender.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/primaryeducation/934063...

sanswork 14y ago

This 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.

binaryseed 14y ago

I 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-lego-friends/ 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.

icebraining 14y ago
How could Lego gone so wrong. In 1981: http://www.thekidworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Lego-ad.jpg http://www.thekidworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Leg...
- vidarh 14y ago
  They've gone so "wrong" because they've been chasing sales. And it's working - the newest "Lego Friends" range is massively outselling their expectations. So don't blame Lego - they're not the ones deciding what people actually want to buy.

brennenHN 14y ago

So I really like this idea, and I get the need to fit the tool into the social context, but it still feels a little bit problematic in its labeling.

modernerd 14y ago

GoldieBlox is exactly the sort of project that Kickstarter should be used for. Stories like, "I'm a talented engineer who's identified a real problem and used my life savings to develop a prototype that could fix it; I've tested it rigorously and gotten great feedback. Now I just need your cash to put in my first order of 5,000 sets." are easy to get behind. Stories like "We've got an idea that seems pretty neat, and we'd like your cash to help us support ourselves while we flesh it out a bit; without your money we'll probably just make a few sacrifices, live a little less comfortably, and build it in our spare time anyway." are harder to rally behind. Both of the female engineers I know got into engineering because their parents were engineers. It would be great to see people with more diverse sources of inspiration entering the field, and toys like GoldieBlox could be a great step in this direction.

mibbitier 14y ago

This looks awful. Buy some Lego instead.

drhowarddrfine 14y ago

Guaranteed: this product will go nowhere due to a lack of sales and interest.

trhtrsh 14y ago

Holy cow, the heroine/model image with impossibly skinny limbs undermines the entire project.

meej 14y ago

Thirty years ago, when I was a six year old little girl, I had these: http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=400-1 http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=400-1 http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=402-1 http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=402-1 They were my favorite. It never occurred to me that they were for boys, and I don't think anyone else tried to tell me that, either. I loved building houses and hotels with my universal building sets and for a long time they fueled dreams of being an architect, until I discovered engineering. I know there has always been some gendering of toys, but I feel like we've regressed from where we were as a society when I was a child, and it's terribly depressing.