August 29, 2012 8:03 am
Female Engineers Design Toys for Girls That Aren’t Just Pink
Maykah’s first toy, Roominate, comes with real circuits. Image: Roominate Kickstarter
Science toys for girls are often, well, terrible. While boys get cool explosions and slime, girls get “Beauty Spa Lab” and “Perfect Perfume Lab.” And everything is always, as a rule, pink. But a team of female engineers are trying to buck that trend. They’re developing toys for girls that will actually inspire young women to go into math and science.
“When we looked around at girls’ toys today, we did not see the kinds of toys that inspired us when we were young,” wrote Alice Brooks, Bettina Chen and Jennifer Kessler wrote at Women 2.0. So the three of them, all graduate students at Stanford, formed a company they call “Maykah.” Their first toy, Roominate, updates the game of playing house: with circuits and custom-built parts, girls won’t just keep house but learn about what goes into building one.
Like many startups these days, Maykah launched a Kickstarter to fund the Roominate project. They hoped for $25,000 and got $85,965. In Silicon Valley, still largely dominated by men, support is widespread. Here’s the company’s Kickstarter video:
Parents could start ordering toys last week, although the final price hasn’t been set yet. The Maykah team hopes that their toys will help put a dent in the highly skewed gender ratio found in the engineering world, where only about 25 percent of the tech-force is female.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Female Scientists Aren’t THAT Rare
Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know
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I remember when I was a kid going into model train stores and Home Despot type stores to find the wires and sockets needed to do things like that – they just weren’t readily available. This is wonderful!! Not every kid has a parent willing to spend the afternoon shopping in the hardware store, for those that don’t this still lets them wire and circuit and build to their heart’s content!
Now I just have to wait for one of the girls I know to reach the right age
Comment by deirdrebeth — August 29, 2012 @ 2:30 pm
Brilliant post and welcome news to the parent of a young girl who has no interest in dolls, prams or anything pink!!
Comment by Dave Long — August 29, 2012 @ 4:06 pm
That looks like fun but the real problem is marketing. All science toys can be enjoyed by every child but when it has a picture of a boy on the cover or has a group of boys in the commercial people assume that only boys will like it. Legos is an excellent example of a once great and equally marketed toy that has since become a separatist toy.
Comment by Magoonski — October 13, 2012 @ 3:20 am