A Robot That’s Good for Your Kid’s Future: Toy Fair 2010
Editor’s Gold Award Pick: As much as I love toys I live with the guilt that so many of them are filling the landfills of the world with toxic plastics and who knows what else. So when I met the robot shown above it was love at first sight. Now what’s interesting about this robot is that most of the parts that you see aren’t included! In fact 90% of what you’re looking at in this toy is made out of recycled items that we throw away every day — which is what makes this hobby kit so ingenious. The Makedo Find & Make a Robot Kit includes a easy-to-use cutting device to hack cardboard and a series of fasteners to hold objects together — and thus by applying the age old toy concepts that you see in Tinker Toys or Lego combined with the idea of recycling you get an amazingly creative activity for your kids.
What I also loved about this toy is that like Lego you can scale it with ease and also build almost anything that you can imagine. Here’s are a few examples that I found on their website which are quite inspiring to say the least:
The other two nice things about this activity is that it encourages kids to use their own imaginations — I can see many a future engineer and designer harkening back to playing with these connectors at the dawn of the 21st Century. In addition with a world gripped by a recession it’s nice to see a toy that can be fun on a low budget!