Author: TatianaZh

A Playmobil boy on a Taikon bar. These thick straws fit perfectly into a figurine’s hand.

Building straws, also known as building tubes, are a popular type of construction set with unique possibilities. They allow you to create silhouettes and contours of different objects and animals. All crafts from these sets can bend and move, so kids can actually play with their creations.

Instead of blocks, these sets have flexible plastic tubes, that look and act like soft cocktail straws. They can bend in any way and hold any position you want. The tubes usually attach to each other with special plastic connectors. The connectors can look and work differently in the different sets, but there are always many ways the straws can connect. The most common version is hard pins that go inside the straw’s hollow end, fixing it in place. Some connectors of this type have only one or two pins, some may have eight or ten. They also can have different forms, like sharp corners or straight rods. However, this connection type usually means that you can connect the straws only with their ends, and never with their middles.

These straws have great building potential, but, sadly, they can’t hold their shape under pressure (unlike, say, block towers that can hold something on their top). The straws’ building possibilities also depend on how long they are.

I suggested that the girls connect the stars together, not in a web, but in pairs. These archs were the result. The girls brought figurines and played with them. Taikon’s straw fits perfectly into the Playmobil man’s hand. So we made impromptu playground near a school so the children had fun on the horizontal pull-up bars. The site is surrounded by a fence with the same 8-pointed stars. Perhaps this is the most playable building from Taikon from the latest experiments with this building set.

Building straws, also known as building tubes, are a popular type of construction set with unique possibilities. They allow you to create silhouettes and contours of different objects and animals. All crafts from these sets can bend and move, so kids can actually play with their creations.

Instead of blocks, these sets have flexible plastic tubes, that look and act like soft cocktail straws. They can bend in any way and hold any position you want. The tubes usually attach to each other with special plastic connectors. The connectors can look and work differently in the different sets, but there are always many ways the straws can connect. The most common version is hard pins that go inside the straw’s hollow end, fixing it in place. Some connectors of this type have only one or two pins, some may have eight or ten. They also can have different forms, like sharp corners or straight rods. However, this connection type usually means that you can connect the straws only with their ends, and never with their middles.

These straws have great building potential, but, sadly, they can’t hold their shape under pressure (unlike, say, block towers that can hold something on their top). The straws’ building possibilities also depend on how long they are.