Pieces of the yellow robot and his ball joints.
Yellow Robot Pieces
Category: Plastic Building Kits
Plastic building kits are construction sets designed for children that primarily utilize plastic components. These kits consist of various interlocking pieces, connectors, panels, and accessories that allow children to build and create a wide range of structures, vehicles, and other imaginative designs.
Plastic building kits are known for their versatility, durability, and ease of use. The pieces are often designed to fit together securely, enabling children to construct stable and sturdy creations. These kits usually come with a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, allowing for endless possibilities and encouraging children to think creatively and problem-solve while constructing their designs.
Many plastic building kits also incorporate specialized parts such as wheels, hinges, and gears, adding an extra level of functionality and enabling children to create movable and interactive models. Some kits may even include motorized components that bring the creations to life with spinning gears or moving parts.
These kits are popular among children of various age groups and provide numerous educational benefits. They promote fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, and logical thinking. Additionally, plastic building kits foster creativity, imagination, and cognitive development as children design and build their own unique structures and scenarios.
Overall, plastic building kits offer a stimulating and engaging way for children to explore construction, design, and engineering concepts while having fun and unleashing their creativity.
K’NEX Bat
A bat from our K’Nex exhibition. We planned to hang it on a thread, but couldt find a good place in this room.
Playmobil + Taikon
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.
Tako Ladder
A small cute ladder we made from the Tako pieces.
Tako is another vintage building set. Its pieces are thin, open frames of different colors and sizes. All these frames have square shapes, and they connect to each other by the edges, forming all kinds of shapes. The manufacturer mostly proposed abstract geometric shapes as possible crafts, but these shapes look pretty, and you can use them to play along with some other toys.
Tako frames connect by the edges – they have tiny rails and empty spaces along the edges to put those rails in. As you can see, the edges are slightly asymmetrical, because the two sides of the square have the rails, and the other two have empty spaces. Sadly, the number of ways you can connect the pieces is limited. Many modern building sets offer more options. Of course, the pieces of the same size hold together the best. The pieces are beautiful but delicate and fragile – they can bend slightly, but they are also relatively easy to break accidentally.
Since all pieces are squares, the basic figure you can assemble is a cube, but it’s also possible to make prisms and other figures. They, however, are more tricky to assemble. The set has pieces of 4 different sizes and 6 colors.
Yellow Robot – TIRO Friend
Another set by the same manufacturer. We bought along with TIRO.
KID K’NEX Zoo Friends Set – Dog
One of the interesting things about the Kid K’Nex pieces is a number of different ways you can connect the “flake” pieces to anything else. If you want to attach a rod to a flake at 90 angle, you can attach the rod not just to the flake centre, but also yo the edjes.
Qubits
This one of the many crafts Qubits manufacturer proposes to make – a bicycle. Sadly, the wheels won’t rotate.
Qubits is a small toy brand making very interesting and unusual building sets. Qubits sets have only two types of pieces – rectangular planks and multi-triangular pieces.
The multi-triangular pieces look like they are made from many connected triangles. They can connect to each other with the matching holes and pegs in the triangles’ centers. Each of these pieces has the same shape, but, connecting and overlapping, they create strong, flexible openwork structures. They can create any shapes and forms, flat or 3D. However, triangular shapes are the most sturdy and resilient ones.
There are also rectangular pieces, that can connect with multi-triangular ones both with the edges and with the openings on their surfaces. These pieces can also connect to each other. Both shapes come in multiple colors, often random, colors. Together, these two shapes can create many surprising and fascinating crafts. Sadly, Qubits have no extra pieces like wheels, so the number of moving crafts and toys is somewhat limited.
Qubits are big enough to be safe even for toddlers. However, these sets can be confusing for the smaller children, so the recommended age is 6+.
Playmobil Grand Castle of Novelmore – Box
Novelmore is a Playmobil series featuring knights, magic and medieval-like fantasy. This set is the biggest of the series and one of the biggest of all Playmobil. After assembling it, you will get a big castle with many details and moving pieces.
DINOSAUR ON QUAD
You can build these pretty toy cars from K’Nex and add some small toys to them.
Zoob Jr. Express
Zoob Jr. Express is anothermZoob construction set for kids. It has large parts in 3 colors. In addition to 31 parts, the set also includes: a locomotive pipe, a safety grate or cowcatcher. That’s what it was called in the Wild West, where locomotives like these roamed around a hundred years ago, scaring cowboys and cows. There are also 1 cute driver face, 1 large wheelset for the locomotive (with rubber tires), 3 standard wheelsets for the locomotive and carriage (also rubber tires). Unlike other Zoob sets, the wheels in this set come in pairs, on an axle, and not individually. The set also has 13 double-sided cards for creating another 28 models (not steam locomotives!). My youngest daughter prefers Zoob in the Jr. version. That’s why we gave the young builder this set for her 4th birthday.
Back in 1997, inventor Michael Grey introduced Zoob, a toy inspired by the science of motion and organism development. Zoob represents an acronym for Zoology, Ontology, Ontogeny, and Botany. Each set has rod-like pieces with joint balls and sockets on their ends. Each of these balls has small bumps on its surface. So the joints can both move and stay in a certain position if you need them to.
This innovative toy features a ball and socket connection system, mimicking the natural movement and design found in people, animals, and machines. With just five basic shapes, Zoob offers 20 different ways to connect them together.
Zoobs are great for helping children improve their fine motor skills. The pieces are small enough to easily manipulate and put them together. However, they’re not too tiny like some other toys, so it’s easier for kids who find small objects tricky.
