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The Science Behind

THE BENEFITS OF CONSTRUCTION TOYS

by Paul Eichen, Toymaker

“The pluses go far beyond what you imagine...”

to Learn

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Intro

The Science Behind The Benefits of Construction Toys

Published by

Rokenbok Toy Company215 US Highway 101, Suite 101Solana Beach, CA 92075(858) 259-4433

www.rokenbok.com

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Write to us at: paule@rokenbok.com

What are the best toys for your child?

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What are the best toys for your child?

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when asking yourself that question because of the crush of choices you face–whether you shop online or walk inside a toy store.

It’s one thing to take a chance on an inexpensive toy, but quite another to purchase a toy that requires a considerable financial commitment.

The aim of this eBook is to help you with your decisions by explaining the benefits of a type of toy that has delighted generations of children. We’ve waded through an exhaustive amount of academic research that explains why construction toys should be in every child’s toy chest.

It’s doubtful that many American children have grown up without playing with a construction set. The most common is the ordinary wooden block, which continues to be a mainstay of preschools and kindergartens.

The Science Behind the Benefits of Construction Toys

Playing to Learn

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Academic research shows that playing with construction toys benefits children in a wide variety of ways.

In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright, probably the nation’s most famous architect, credited playing with simple blocks with spurring his love of architecture. Wright’s son John, also an architect, ultimately invented Lincoln Logs after being inspired by his dad’s work.

Along with blocks and Lincoln Logs, many other toys, which attract children of different ages, also belong in the construction category. They include such toys as Rokenbok, LEGOs, K’NEX, Erector Sets, and Tinkertoys.

You might assume that you know why these building toys would benefit your child. Sure, construction sets like Rokenbok or LEGOs can help children with spatial skills, encourage imaginative and cooperative play and lure them away from a television or computer. But the pluses, as you’ll discover, go far beyond that cursory list. Academic research shows that playing with a construction toy benefits children in a wide variety of ways including:

b

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The ideal creative environment for learning is one described has having a “low floor” and a “high ceiling.”

Provides an optimum way of learning.•Increases math performance.•Promotes creative problem solving.•Improves language skills.•Spurs out-of-the-box thinking.•

Here’s a closer look at some of these research highlights:

Construction toys provide an ideal learning environment

Obviously, children learn by playing in all sorts of ways. A child can benefit by chasing a ball, talking with a teddy bear and playing checkers.

Seymour Papert, a renowned MIT professor and a seminal figure in the field of technology and education, set out on a mission years ago to determine what a child’s optimum creative environment might be. He ultimately concluded that a toy or technology presents the ideal creative environment for children when it offers what he calls a “low floor” and a “high ceiling.”

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A “low ceiling” means that a child can play with the toy without a lot of advance knowledge.

What does Papert mean by that?

A toy that possesses a low floor allows a child to play without needing a lot of advance experience or knowledge. Blocks provide a wonderful example. Even toddlers with pudgy fingers can stack blocks and knock them down.

What makes toys like Rokenbok and other sophisticated construction toys ideal is that they also possess a “high ceiling.” As a child ages, the toys grow with them and provide tougher challenges. While a two-year-old might not be able to stack more than a handful of blocks, his older sister might be constructing block skyscrapers or, with Rokenbok, complete interactive cityscapes. The best construction toys offer progressive levels of challenge. Many children end up playing with Rokenbok, LEGO, and K’NEX well into their teen years by making increasingly more challenging and intricate structures.

Construction toys increase mathematical abilities Not many multi-year studies exist which illustrate what seems logical enough -- that play encourages learning. It’s even rarer for studies to look at the educational value of a specific type of toy. It is for both of these reasons that a lengthy study conducted by education

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A “high ceiling” means that the toy’s complexity can grow along with the child.

professors at Florida State University is so welcome for parents of any child who likes to build things.

The aim of the Florida research was to determine if preschoolers who played with blocks would perform better in math classes as they grew older. Specifically the researchers wanted to spot any link between the sophistication of a child’s construction play and his or her later math performance.

The study, which began in 1982, didn’t end until after the children had graduated from high school. Sixteen years later the researchers obtained the participants’ academic records from their elementary and middle schools, as well as high school.

What the researchers discovered is encouraging news to any child who excels at putting together a castle built with wooden blocks, a LEGO spacecraft, or a Rokenbok cityscape. The students who built the most elaborate structures as preschoolers showed greater math ability in both middle school and as high schoolers. In seventh grade, the students who fashioned more elaborate block structures were performing significantly better on standardized math tests. When the former preschoolers

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Whiz kids & math performance in high school

High school students, who excelled in block play as preschoolers, ultimately:

Enrolled in a greater number of •advanced math courses; Took a higher number of honors •math courses; and Earned greater math grades.•

reached high school the advantages of the block builders were even more pronounced. In high school, the kids who built more complex block structures enrolled in more advanced math classes, took a greater number of honors math courses, and received higher math grades. Of course, skeptics might contend that the kids who aced their math tests did so because they were naturally gifted mathematically and spatially. Anticipating this argument, the Florida researchers controlled for the children’s intelligence quotient (IQ), as well as gender. So it is plausible to conclude as one academic suggested, “that block play itself influenced the cognitive development of these kids.”

Given these successes, you might be surprised that the math advantage didn’t show up in elementary school. When the educators examined the math performance of the students in grades three and five they detected no difference in math performance between the preschool block aficionados and the other children.

Educators speculate that the math advantage didn’t appear until the children were older because math tests in earlier grades measure minimum skills and memorization. Older children, however, must use their cognitive skills to understand the abstractions of

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Famous Americans who Played with Construction Toys

Albert EinsteinThe physicist and Nobel Laureate whose last name became synonymous with “genius” played with metal construction toys even before a Yale-educated Olympic gold medalist created the Erector Set around the turn of the 20th century. Frank Lloyd WrightThe famous architect credited blocks with encouraging him to be an architect. As an adult, he was quoted as saying, “The maple wood blocks are in my fingers to this day.”Buckminster FullerThe inventor of the geodesic dome played with the same German geometric-shaped blocks that Wright owned. Milton Bradley began manufacturing these blocks in the United States in 1872.Frank GehryA world-renowned architect, who has designed landmark buildings around the world, played with blocks of wood that his grandmother salvaged from a lumberyard.

advanced high school math such as trigonometry, geometry and calculus. Other studies on the effects of preschool activities have shown the same delayed academic responses.

Educators agree that blocks and other types of construction toys can assist children in developing mathematical skills by helping them learn about patterns, shapes, sizes, symmetry, numbers and many other math concepts.

Construction toys promote creative problem solving

Is drawing with an Etch A Sketch better for a child than racing Hot Wheels? Is digging into a soft mound of Play-Doh preferable to playing Candyland? It’s impossible to answer those questions, but it is possible to state that toys encourage different types of learning.

One way to roughly divide up the toy universe is to categorize toys by whether they promote divergent or convergent thinking.

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Famous Americans who Played with Construction Toys continued...

Stephen ChuThe Nobel Laureate in physics and Secretary of Energy in Barack Obama’s administration loved playing with Erector Sets. “The living room rug was frequently littered with hundreds of metal girders and tiny nuts and bolts surrounding half-finished structures. An understanding mother allowed me to keep the projects going for days on end.”

Larry PageThe cofounder of Google built a working ink-jet printer out of LEGOs as a child. When constructing the original Google server equipment, Page used LEGOs to create an external disk drive casing. “I attribute a great deal of my understanding and ability with mechanical devices to LEGOs and similar construction toys.”

A puzzle is the sort of toy that encourages convergent thinking. There is one right way to complete a puzzle. Educational videos that help kids learn their colors or ABCs also rely on convergent thinking. When a computer game asks a child to identify the color of a pink pig, the correct answer is always going to be pink. In contrast, toys that encourage divergent thinking, such as construction toys, provide children the freedom to think outside the box by dreaming up unlimited ways to create. With a pile of Rokenbok, for instance, children are limited only by their imagination on what they create. It’s the same with LEGOs, K’NEX and other design toys.

Researchers have documented that children who play with blocks have performed better on problems that suggest a variety of solutions. In tackling problems, the block builders also tend to display more creativity.

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Construction toys encourage language development

Research suggests that language can be enhanced through simple block play and hence through other types of construction play. One study that reached this conclusion examined the verbal abilities of two sets of toddlers. Researchers at the University of Washington gave the parents of half of the children a set of blocks along with instructions on how to encourage block play. The control group didn’t get the blocks until the experiment was finished.

After six months, the children who had been playing with blocks performed better when tested for vocabulary, grammar and verbal comprehension. On any given day, these same children were more than 80% less likely to watch television.

Construction toys enhance learning

If you aren’t an educator, you probably haven’t heard of a learning theory called “constructionism.” This popular theory maintains that children learn most effectively when they are actively making things and drawing their own conclusions through creative experimentation.

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Regardless of how much educators applaud the concept of hands-on experiences, when children leave kindergarten they focus most heavily on pencil and paper learning as teachers start prepping them for years of grueling standardized testing. It’s this reality that frustrates the experts at the Lifelong Kindergarten group within the MIT Media Laboratory. They believe that including hands-on exploration in school curriculums can produce smarter kids.

With many schools unable or unwilling to provide this enrichment, plenty of parents are trying to fill the void themselves. As we’ve learned, construction toys like Rokenbok, K’NEX and LEGOs can help children enhance their learning experience in creative ways.

In fact, Mitchel Resnick, who is director of MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten, observes that design-based toys can be an invaluable resource:

People construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful products. They might be constructing sand castles, LEGO machines or computer programs. What’s important is that they are engaged in creating something that is meaningful to themselves or to others around them.

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According to constructionism, kids don’t get ideas, they make them. Sometimes all a child needs is a little encouragement, as well as the tools to get started.

Building an ideal learning environment

Selecting the right toys for your child’s toy chest is important and, as parents, it’s a big responsibility for us too. We’ll leave crafts, books, musical instruments, role-playing, and the many other forms of beneficial play to other experts. At Rokenbok, we’ve made it our mission to understand construction play. Good construction toys are easy to play with, capture the imagination, and offer increasing challenge over time. Classic examples are unit blocks, wooden train systems, and doll houses. We believe these toys belong in every toy box.

Rokenbok Toys are designed according to the principles presented here. Easy entry with increasing challenge over time are present in our preschool block system, in every Rokenbok robotic machine and construction element, and especially when the whole system is used together to make large scale interactive constructions.

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Rokenbok is one seamless system, and it is classic. . . it will grow with your child for many years to come. Children can incorporate their very first Rokenbok toy into their most magnificent and complex Rokenbok creation ten years later. Rokenbok is where children graduate when they are moving on from wooden blocks and trains. And, it’s where older children go for a more creative (divergent) experience than what’s offered by most mass-market construction toys. What our Rokenbok community tells us is the most unique feature of Rokenbok is that it gets the whole family playing together; older and younger siblings, friends, and parents (especially dads).

The design of our system is sophisticated and carefully considered in every detail. We invite you to explore what we have to offer, because it takes awhile to see all the possibilities and benefits. The closer you look at our toys, the more you will see our values and our mission. We believe we have created the ideal learning environment for tomorrow’s engineers and architects, designers and technologists, managers and leaders.

Rokenbok is playtime well spent.Paul Eichen, a.k.a. Mr. Rokenbok

Founder, Rokenbok Toy Company

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References

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