Educational toys

Part of my training was in the investigation of space and structure. There are many ways of doing this, and I believe it is good to use as many as possible in order to explore different media and the ways in which they affect the outcome of the studies. Traditionally, and most easily, lines on paper are a way of making the first essays into this study but, very quickly, you need to look at other materials in order to be able to see space and structure in the round.

Card, straws, string and glue are some of the most common materials used but clay, wood and metals also have their place in more mature work, the latter implying a more considered approach due to the time it takes to fabricate in these materials.

For a long time there has been the tradition in the toy industry to produce constructional toys for children to make things from. Perhaps the best known is Lego, but I remember with great affection Bayco and Meccano, the former relating to the construction of buildings, the latter more suited to engineering works.

Bayco, regrettably, is no longer made. It utilised plastic blocks which were assembled on a vertical metal rod framework fixed into a brown or green baseboard. Meccano was completely metal. Both of them suffered from a propensity to rust. Lego, of course, utilises plastic blocks and, in order to keep up with modern trends, has added to it a variety of mechanical and electronic elements in order to enable a wider range of objects to be constructed. Meccano is still in use and has also developed a much wider vocabulary in order to appeal to a wider market.

The reason I mention these three childhood toys is that I used them all at one time or another, and I‘m sure that in playing with them I developed subconsciously a better understanding of three-dimensional space.

Reflecting on this some time ago I thought I might make something similar for the benefit of children. The idea was that it would be a toy which was simple to make, nice to touch and handle, and was capable of being used to make something or other – but what, I wasn‘t sure of initially.

I thought that it would also be nice if it appealed to different age groups and, to cut a long story short, decided that it should also be suited to an up-market group or be capable of use to examine spaces more formally, or at least be capable of attractive display.

These factors seemed to point towards something made from wood, and blocks seemed an obvious choice. There are lots of wood blocks on the market so I looked for solutions which would encourage small children to handle a block with some shape to it, and which would also lend itself to construction. I don‘t imagine that this a novel solution and suspect it exists somewhere or other as it is a simple geometric shape.

In the end this resolved itself to a relatively simple shape, a cube with its corners missing.

Although I described it as a cube with corners missing, in fact I came upon the shape with an assembly of square-sectioned rods in the proportion 3:1. This produces the basic unit seen to the right and which can be produced in a basic and mirrored form. The interesting thing to me was that in putting two together the cube is formed with a small hollow space in its centre.

Having written that I’ve just remembered that, as a student I had made a sculptural system along the same lines, but, at that time, with cylinders of the same proportion. I had a more practical reason for their design as I needed a lamp at the time and this arrangement enabled me to produce a simple, three-lamped light from plastic tubing which combined a pleasant sculptural form with a functional requirement.

In assembling the basic blocks, there is an interesting effect in being aware of the internal space which is not visible in the assembled cubed section. This means that there is more to visualise and explore for those playing with the units. I also made a set of them from painted hollow tubes which gave an added interest to the volumes as you can see from the comparison drawing above.

From a structural point of view there is a far smaller point of contact between the tubes which makes this junction very important. Depending on the scale of the construction a careful decision must be taken on glues or mechanical fixings.

Both the rectangular and cylindrical units are pleasing to play with, particularly for small hands, and can be put together both at right angles to the floor, that is balancing along their plane edges, or on their pointed corners. Here the decision on size was to find the optimal size and weight. Larger units are more manageable by small hands but weigh more. This points to a relatively light wood as I believe that a natural material is also of benefit to the project.

A wide range of variations can be made in their mutual arrangement, and the units can be stacked to quite a height, the natural friction of the wood maintaining some semblance of structual stability, even when they should logically fall, as in the photograph below to the right.

The wooden prototypes I made are not as perfect as I would like them to be but, even as they are, they have a pleasant tactile feel, are attractive to use and develop interesting shapes in their use of pattern and shadow. Although not useful for architectural model building, they are certainly capable of use for the study of the interplay of shapes.