Wooden blocks, Tinkertoy, Meccano (Erector sets), Cuisenaire rods, Fischer-Price and Lego are classic examples of good (educational) toy design.

This is because they are generally fun, safe, enticing, and are open ended. They teaching categorisation, sorting, problem solving, creativity, imagination, team work, construction, "making do", modularity etc.

Some toys are optimised for cost (dominos). Others are optimised to take money away from parents (tablets)! That is why there is a a wide spectrum of toys available. Good toy designers will sit down in a multi-discipline team and decide first what exactly is to be taught (A-B-C or how to build an autonomous robot). Then to work out how these can be encapsulated in a toy that will be educating the child while the child is having fun.

Today my grandchildren had fun with a wide variety plastic farm and wild animals, plastic trees and fences. The box does not come with instructions! It would have been a better design if the different manufacturers had agreed beforehand on a common scale factor.

For more information, throw some of my keyphrases above into Scholar and Google.

Try this article:

Hinske, S., Langheinrich, M., & Lampe, M. (2008, February). Towards guidelines for designing augmented toy environments. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems (pp. 78-87). ACM.

Dear Dr Math,

I just read your interesting question and thought you may find the following reference interesting:

P. Guan et al., "Research on Technologies of Green Design and Manufacturing for Toys Design", Applied Mechanics and Materials, Vols. 397-400, pp. 928-931, 2013

Yours sincerely,

Rainer

Hi,

Here are some guidelines on toy design:

-building games

-Dolls, animals and miniatures

-Vehicles

-Casse headers

-Physical activity

-Collection

- Promotional toys

-Music toys

-Toys designed for cognitive development.

With my best wishes.

Adel OUESLATI

Dear F.Math

You might find our recent paper entitled "The Value of Toys: 6–8 -year-old children's toy preferences and the functional analysis of popular toys" interesting and helpful.

In the paper we introduce the framework of the functional manipulation potential of toys which can be used for designing and analyzing toys. Please feel free to send me a message if there is anything I could help you with

Best regards,

Pekka

Article The Value of Toys: 6–8 -year-old children's toy preferences ...