THE BENEFITS OF CONSTRUCTION TOYS - K - "The pluses go far beyond what you imagine "
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ROK
eBook
K
Book
No. 1 Playing to Learn
The Science Behind
THE BENEFITS OF
CONSTRUCTION TOYS
“The pluses go far beyond what you imagine...”
by Paul Eichen, Toymaker
ROK
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The Science Behind
The Benefits of Construction Toys
Intro
Published by
Rokenbok Toy Company
215 US Highway 101, Suite 101
Solana Beach, CA 92075
(858) 259-4433
www.rokenbok.com
Follow us on Twitter
Join us on Facebook
See Rokenbok at YouTube
Write to us at: paule@rokenbok.com
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Playing to Learn
What are the best toys
Page
1 for your child?
The Science Behind the Benefits of
Construction Toys
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.
Academic research
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shows that playing
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with construction
toys benefits
children in a wide
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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:
The ideal creative
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environment for
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learning is one
described has having a
“low floor” and a
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“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.”A “low ceiling” means
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that a child can play
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with the toy without
a lot of advance
knowledge.
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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 educationA “high ceiling”
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means that the
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toy’s complexity can
grow along with the
child.
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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 preschoolersHigh school students, who excelled in block
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Whiz kids & math play as preschoolers, ultimately:
performance in
• Enrolled in a greater number of
advanced math courses;
Took a higher number of honors
high school
•
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• 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 ofROK
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advanced high school math such as trigonometry, geometry and Famous Americans who Played with Construction Toys
calculus. Other studies on the effects of preschool activities have
shown the same delayed academic responses.
Albert Einstein
Educators agree that blocks and other types of construction toys The physicist and Nobel Laureate whose last name became
synonymous with “genius” played with metal construction
can assist children in developing mathematical skills by helping toys even before a Yale-educated Olympic gold medalist
them learn about patterns, shapes, sizes, symmetry, numbers and created the Erector Set around the turn of the 20th century.
many other math concepts. Frank Lloyd Wright
The famous architect credited blocks with encouraging him
Construction toys promote creative problem solving
to be an architect. As an adult, he was quoted as saying,
“The maple wood blocks are in my fingers to this day.”
Is drawing with an Etch A Sketch better for a child than racing Buckminster Fuller
Hot Wheels? Is digging into a soft mound of Play-Doh preferable
The inventor of the geodesic dome played with the same
to playing Candyland? It’s impossible to answer those questions, German geometric-shaped blocks that Wright owned. Milton
but it is possible to state that toys encourage different types of Bradley began manufacturing these blocks in the United
learning. States in 1872.
Frank Gehry
One way to roughly divide up the toy universe is to categorize A world-renowned architect, who has designed landmark
toys by whether they promote divergent or convergent thinking. buildings around the world, played with blocks of wood that
his grandmother salvaged from a lumberyard.ROK
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A puzzle is the sort of toy that encourages convergent thinking. Famous Americans who Played with Construction Toys
There is one right way to complete a puzzle. Educational videos continued...
that help kids learn their colors or ABCs also rely on convergent
Stephen Chu
thinking. When a computer game asks a child to identify the color
The Nobel Laureate in physics and Secretary of Energy
of a pink pig, the correct answer is always going to be pink.
in Barack Obama’s administration loved playing with
Erector Sets. “The living room rug was frequently littered
In contrast, toys that encourage divergent thinking, such as with hundreds of metal girders and tiny nuts and bolts
construction toys, provide children the freedom to think outside surrounding half-finished structures. An understanding
the box by dreaming up unlimited ways to create. With a pile mother allowed me to keep the projects going for days on
of Rokenbok, for instance, children are limited only by their end.”
imagination on what they create. It’s the same with LEGOs, Larry Page
K’NEX and other design toys.
The cofounder of Google built a working ink-jet printer
out of LEGOs as a child. When constructing the original
Researchers have documented that children who play with blocks Google server equipment, Page used LEGOs to create an
have performed better on problems that suggest a variety of external disk drive casing. “I attribute a great deal of my
solutions. In tackling problems, the block builders also tend to understanding and ability with mechanical devices to LEGOs
display more creativity. and similar construction toys.”ROK
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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.ROK
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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.ROK
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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.ROK
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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 CompanyROK
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References
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Advanced Constructional play with LEGOs among Preschoolers as a Predictor of Later School Achievement in Mathematics Wolfgang, Charles; Stannard, Laura; Jones, Ithel Oct. 2003
Block Play Jump-Starts Children's Language Acquisition PR Newswire Nov.9,2006
Block Play Performance Among Preschoolers' as a Predictor of Later School Achievement in Mathematics Wolfgang, Charles; Stannard, Laura; & Jones, Ithel Journal of Research in Childhood Education March22,2001
Building Blocks to Language: What Every Teacher Should Know. (Teaching through Blocks(Toys)) Lee, Katherine Working Mother December 1,2007
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Classic Building Blocks Beat Media Toys Schmidt, Sarah Winnipeg Free Press Nov.10, 2006
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Does Easy Do It? Children, Games and Learning Game Developer Magazine 1998
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High Beam Research: There’s More to Children’s Block Play than Meets the Eye Stephens, Karen 2002
High Beam Research: A Review: Journal of Research in Childhood Education VoL.15 No.2 Burriss, Kathleen Glascott Childhood Education Sept. 22, 2001
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How Much Do We Know about the Importance of Play in Child Development? Tsao, Ling-Ling 2002
Intelligence in Children: Can we Make our Kids Smarter? Dewar, Gwen Parenting Science 2008
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Lego Builders of Tomorrow Panel Discussion Transcript LEGO Builders of Tomorrow April 6,2006
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Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures: The Nobel Prizes 1997 Editor Tore Frangsmyr 1998
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Papert on Piaget Papert, Seymour 1999
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Playful Learning Lego Learning Institute Edition 3 Jan./Feb.2004
Preparing for the Unexpected Statler, Matt & Roos, Johan Next Practice vol.1 Issue nr.3 Sept.2002
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Toy Stories Bensen, Etienne Association for Psychological Science vol.19 no.12 Dec.2006
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Why Children Need Play Leong, Deborah & Bodrova,Elena Early Childhood Today
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