Toys Stories – Construction Toys and educational games for kids
Posted October 25, 2009on:
Construction toys and creative games encourage creativity, curiosity, manual abilities and meets the incredible thirst for knowledge of the human nature. In the past, due to the fragility of the materials used to make toys, we have few traces to identify a precise date for the invention of construction toys. One of the first appearance of constructions toys dates back to medieval times, around 1245, when a Franciscan monk, around 1245 , reported about an Arab game he had learned in the Holy Land, consisting of modular elements to form a sphere.
Other historical finds and ancient books, prove the Arab origins of constructions toys and modular board games, usually composed of elements of geometric form. In 1500 constructions where not only toys, but olso ornamental building miniatures in the royal courts, a game of ability for jesters and a nice hobby for the ladies. In fact, in the Middle Age, constructions toys and other games where not designed for children but for adults.
Construction toys follow the same history of tales, narrations created to entertain kings and nobles during ancient times and later become (1700-1800) stories for kids. Just like the Grimm Brothers’ tales in these period construction toys became for the first time an educational pastime for kids.
Many pedagogues and social scientists started writing essays on constructions and educational games for kids to promote healthy activities and stimulate the ability and the cleverness of the children. In this period toys became the most serious actions of children and between the end of ‘800 and early ‘900 the Liberty art movement also involved the construction games in many artworks.
The first construction toy ever realized in modern times were however limited to the skeleton and the lack of details had favored the critics’ accuses of lack of realism. But, according to German pedagogues, this lack of excessive realism allows to the child to explore all the potentiality of the game, just like the dolls, whose faces are so expressionless, but the child can make them laugh or cry second his sentiments.
At the beginning of ‘900, in England, with the positivism and scientific revolution, is given top priority to scientific and technical aspects of educational games and realistic engineering constructions toys are the new clever games for kids. With the invention of the plastic, construction toys became lighter and easier to play and the educational toys market is enriched with new models, shapes and pieces more and more similar to a small scale wonderland.
Compared to the structured games or one piece toys a construction toy has, undoubtedly, different characteristics that can influence positively the intellectual and the emotional sphere of the child. If every form of play has the function of an educational experience for its players, the game of construction and reconstruction of any kind of object is still nowadays one of the most creative way of playing.