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.
It seems that K’Nex absolutely loves carnival rides. This is another ride-themed set with a small motor. It offers to build roller coasters with a moving car. Since this set belongs to the Education series, it offers small experiments that explain physics to children with the models they build.
Deluxe pink set by Gears!Gears!Gears! brand has 100 pieces – interlocking baseplates, poles, and, of course, gears. With this set, you can build an upright construction, add the axis pieces, and decorate your craft with the gears. Then you can turn a crank on any of these gears, and watch all the connected gears rotate.
The pieces of this set are big and sturdy, so they can survive many years of use. This set is not very complicated in its concept, so you can give it to the children you are 3 years old or older. You can also mix the Deluxe set with any other Gear!Gears!Gears! set, enhancing it with extra pieces. This set comes in two color schemes, assorted colors and pink. This photo shows the pink version.
Learning Resources is a popular and well-known toy brand from the USA that specializes in STEM toys. Gears!Gears!Gears! is a series of building sets with moving and rotating gears in them. These gears may have different functions in different sets, but you can mix them and use them together. Gears! Gears! Gears! sets show exactly how the gear transmission works, and you can use them as a colorful and simple explanation of the gear physics.
A great thing about the big Clics blocks kit are that you can build big and sturdy things from them.
ClicsToys is a Belgian company that was established in 2001. It makes the well-known Clics building blocks in its own factory in Kempen. Clics building sets have square pieces of identical form and shape. They easily connect at their edges, creating joints you can move.
With These plastic squares, you can create surfaces and fold them into 3D shapes. There are endless possibilities, even though Clics have very few extra pieces and accessories. Some sets have wheels and decorative panels, but this is pretty much it. On the other hand, Clics sets usually have many pieces, so you can create something truly complicated from just one set.
Since the basic pieces of any Clics blocks kit, all the basic forms you can assemble from it are cubic or brick-like. However, thanks to the movable joints, you can assemble them at different angles, creating different shapes.
There are ways to create triangular or sloping figures if you assemble the pieces just right. The cubes, however, are the most sturdy and reliable structures this set can offer. There are also a possibility of creating a flat mosaic, combining the pieces of different colors.
Clics Glitter is a type of Clics with colorful plastic with glitter. This particular set has 133 pieces and extra decorations, like stickers. This photo shows size of the Clics Glitter Bucket pieces.
ClicsToys, a Belgian company established in 2001, operates its very own factory located in Kempen, where they craft the popular Clics building blocks. These building sets mostly have square pieces, all sharing identical form and shape. What sets Clics apart is their ability to connect smoothly at the edges, allowing flexible joint movements.
Using these plastic squares, the creative possibilities are endless, even though Clics sets tend to offer relatively few extra pieces and accessories. Some sets may include wheels and decorative panels, but few extra items. The true strength of Clics lies in the generous number of pieces in their sets, enabling you to make even biggest creations with ease.
The fundamental building blocks in Clics are square, which naturally leads to the formation of cubic or brick-like structures. However, the great advantage of these blocks is the ability to connect them at various angles, making diverse shapes. Careful assembly can even give you triangular or sloping figures. Nevertheless, the most robust and tough structures in Clics are cube-shaped. Additionally, you can create flat mosaics by combining pieces of different colors.
We actually hanged it by a thread, so it rises in the morning and goes down in the evening.
Playmobil has a series of portable, travel sets. They have very few pieces or items, but they come in travel cases or boxes. These sets can be a good option for a long travel or an outdoors playtime.
Bendits is an old American building set. It has tubes with pins at the ends and geometric details with holes. We purchase it for junior experiments; I relied specifically on the presence of the plate when purchasing it. Baseplates are rare in the sets like this one, so I decided to give it a try.
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.
Deluxe set by Gears!Gears!Gears! brand has 100 pieces – interlocking baseplates, poles, and, of course, gears. With this set, you can build an upright construction, add the axis pieces, and decorate your craft with the gears. Then you can turn a crank on any of these gears, and watch all the connected gears rotate.
The pieces of the Gears!Gears!Gears Deluxe set are big and sturdy, so they can survive many years of use. This set is not very complicated in its concept, so you can give it to the children you are 3 years old or older. You can also mix the Deluxe set with any other Gear!Gears!Gears! set, enhancing it with extra pieces. This set comes in two color schemes, assorted colors and pink. This photo shows the assorted color version.
Learning Resources is a popular and well-known toy brand from the USA that specializes in STEM toys. Gears!Gears!Gears! is a series of building sets with moving and rotating gears in them. These gears may have different functions in different sets, but you can mix them and use them together. Gears!Gears!Gears! sets show exactly how the gear transmission works, and you can use them as a colorful and simple explanation of the gear physics.
Building set “Unlimited Fantasy” (Unika-Ukraine) – diameter 1.7 inch. I really liked the quality, I didn’t even expect it. Easy to attach, easy to detach, holds well. The children really liked the gears because the parts can roll while interlocked over each other (as gears should be). Here you can connect several of them in a row, take them by one end, shake them, and at the other end the gear rolls. For now they are just having fun. Even dad, who is generally difficult to please, liked the set, and he built a carousel. I inserted a pencil into the central hole and turned it and had fun for a long time :)))
These gears are a version of a popular type of building set. The gears in this one are not rotating on top of some structure – they are the basic building blocks of the set. The gears connect if you interlock the pins, or if you stack them. With these simple connections, you can build different shapes and mosaics.
All the gears have the same shape and size, the only difference is the color. However, there are still many possibilities to build, especially if you have many pieces. The gears can also interlock if you connect them at an angle. Sadly, the possibilities to build a moving toy are very limited, because the gears can’t really move once they connect. There are also no extra pieces or decorations, so the gears are the only things you have to work with.
The gears themselves are rather big, they are safe for the small children to play with. They also can hold together even in a very big craft without falling apart.
Zoob 125 piece set is a classic Zoob set in all possible ways. It has those typical Zoob pieces with balls and sockets, but no extra pieces. Still, the possibilities are endless, and if you want to try out Zoob, this is a good starting set.
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.
Zoob building sets have won awards because they’re different from regular building blocks. They use plastic pieces that snap together, like gears and joints, to build all kinds of objects, limited only by your imagination. After you build something with Zoob, you can actually play with it – the pieces were designed to move after being assembled, so you can have fun with the toys you create.
Zoobs are great for helping children improve their fine motor skills. The pieces are small enough to easily manipulate and put them together. But they’re not too tiny like some other toys, so it’s easier for kids who find small objects tricky.
