GoldieBlox makes engineering construction kits for girls ages 4 to 9. These aren't just pink versions of Lego sets; instead, they include books that put the engineering projects in the context of a story. The idea is that the girls using these toys are building gizmos to help characters they care about.The toy-plus-story model works; witness the success of toy company American Girl. Founder Deborah Sterling majored in mechanical engineering at Stanford. Her first toy in the series, Goldie Blox and the Spinning Machine, came out this spring after a successful Kickstarter campaign.This week, GoldieBlox showed it not only knows how to make toys, it knows how to make viral videos. The company took the Beastie Boys' song "Girls," changed the lyrics more than a little, and brought in an 8-year-old female rapper to sing it, along with two other young girls to perform in the video:
A team of adults led by 39-year-old Brett Doar created a Rube Goldberg contraption, the "Princess Machine" out of toys; it took about two and a half weeks to build, reported Doar, who has a masters degree in arts, computation, and engineering from the University of California at Irvine. Doar previously worked on the Rube Goldberg machine created for the pop group OK Go, alongside Brent Bushnell, profiled in IEEE Spectrum's 2012 article, Rube Goldberg 2.0. But the Princess Machine was a project that was as much a labor of passion as it was an engineering job for Doar.
"I used to be a teacher," he told me, recalling that he too often watched girls being turned away from engineering. "I remember one student who was interested in building stuff, and had built this one little thing she brought in that she was excited about, and I remember thinking I hope she doesn't get that beaten out of her by peer pressure. Because I've seen that happen in a school environment, with a young woman who enters middle school with a strong interest in science and math, faces pressure to do cheerleader stuff, and two years later she's been transformed, and isn't interested in science anymore. It breaks my heart."