Girls Gone GoldieBlox!

Ever since becoming the father of a little girl almost two years ago, I’ve found myself swimming through, tripping over, and yes, occasionally playing with an assortment of baby toys. Mind you, I didn’t actually purchase most of these toys, nor did my wife. That’s why we have siblings and parents (and parents of those parents). Many of these toys are, what some might consider, geared toward females: dolls, a kitchen set, and (my wife’s impulse buy) a tent-like princess castle that took up no less than half of my living room until one night, after having tripped over it for the gazillionth time, I took it apart in a fit of prideful parental superiority and stashed it in the basement. Also, the pink! Why does it all have to be so damn pink?

The next day, my daughter, Kaylin didn’t seem to notice her princess castle was missing. In fact, that’s how she is about most of the expensive toys she’s received in her young life. The more elaborate and fancy-looking the doll or high-tech the toy, the quicker she loses interest. You know what toys she actually is into? Pretty much anything that’s not a toy. Cups, bottles, boxes, remote controls, DVDs, smart phones. Anything she can stack or build with, really. Ever since this girl figured out she’s got two hands and ten fingers, she’s had this innate ability to put objects together in creative ways. I’ve seen her stack cups together and figure out how various objects interlock at a time when putting one object on top of the other should have been impossible with her tiny digits. It wasn’t long before I started telling people that the best place to get a quick, cheap gift item for Kaylin was at the dollar store.

That is, until I heard about GoldieBlox.

Debbie Sterling, a Stanford University engineering student and creator of GoldieBlox, claims she was put off by the high level of male dominance in the engineering field – 89 percent men – after having grown up without toys that build spatial skills, she believes, because of her gender. As a result, she decided to produce a toy that combined building with reading in order to encourage and nurture female ingenuity in the field.

A GoldieBlox set contains a storybook, five animal figures, and a set of construction materials. Kids follow “Goldie the girl inventor and her motley crew of friends, who go on adventures and solve problems by building simple machines.”

I can’t tell you how excited I am about this idea. Maybe I’m still reveling in being a new dad to a little girl, but when it comes to toys, I’m really into the idea of my daughter having positive female examples to help her develop hands-on skills (yes, even if a few of those female examples happen to be fictional).

Customer reviews are showing tremendous praise for GoldieBlox, so the $29.99 retail price just might be worth it after all.

Kaylin’s birthday is coming up in October. Anyone want to make a certain two-year-old girl a happy little engineer?

Alan Atchison is a Contributing Writer to The Rogue. He is a Senior Publications Editor at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania), where he also earned a Masters of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing. He lives in Philadelphia, PA with his wife and two daughters. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.