Because a certain Kickstarter campaign had piqued my interest a few months ago, Santa was able to deliver a Roominate kit for my 7-year-old daughter on Christmas morning. Designed by two female engineers, Roominate is billed as a building toy for girls.
When we had a nice big chunk of time, we opened the Roominate kit and my daughter got to work. Though there were instructions, she took stock of all of the box contents and had a look of intuitive understanding: Build a room. Yeah, got it. And away she went. She put together all of the walls like a blank canvas, stared at it, then decided she was going to make a bedroom. The little blue and orange plastic pieces snap together in a wide variety of ways to make furniture and other room decor. She built a desk, a bed, a nightstand, and an aquarium stand before running out of pieces.
Then came one of the things that got Roominate noticed – electronics. Our kit came with a switch, wires, and a spinning motor to build a (suggested) fan. We noticed that when building the fan as instructed, the paper blades would fly off whenever we turned it on. Then we started brainstorming other uses for it. One of the ideas I liked best was my daughter's idea of giving the room its own spin art station. While I had hoped for the electronics to be more integrated (lights, etc.) this strange little motor sparked some great creative thinking.
As we come up on Toy Fair season and my email is awash with gendered "girl toys" and "boy toys," I always spend way too much time thinking about the good and the bad of that. Bad are things like the Boy and Girl categories in the Toy of the Year award nominees. Girls get dress up toys and pets, while boys get weapons and battle toys (and Skylanders! No fair!) Girls also get Lego Friends, with which I have a complicated relationship.
Roominate appeals to me in a way that Lego Friends turns me off, and shows that toys designed thoughtfully with a gender in mind can work. Both toys want to get girls building, and both try to tap into girls' play patterns. You could argue that both toys don't have a ton of building happening relative to other building toys, but it's in the tapping into girls' play patterns where I think Roominate is more successful. I loved watching my daughter create little details for the room, like the math homework on the desk and the poster on the wall for her fictitious band, The Waffles. When she was done, she immediately started strategizing the next room, and what else we could bring from around the house to add to it. I'd like to challenge her to add more electronics to the room, and it just so happens that a Little Bits kit has just arrived. Also, even though these are designed for girls, the packaging is wonderfully gender neutral for boys who will enjoy it too.
The Roominate kits start range from $59 to $225, so they're far from cheap. I hope that as Roominate expands their fledgling business they have more price points and even more types of electronics to spark kids' curiosity. I'd love to see this toy take off.
