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.
We too want to participate in filling out the BuildKitPedia! We recently purchased a suitcase of the KidK`nex children’s construction set. It contained 70 (!) parts and a colorful instruction poster with 50 possible models. My daughter really liked this set, and together with her we immediately made all sorts of weird creatures. Our six characters are crafts from this suitcase.
Waffle blocks are very popular type of plastic building blocks. In these sets, each piece have pegs and square holes, and you can connect pieces in multiple ways to build both 2D and 3D crafts. The bricks connect to each other seamlessly, almost like in a jigsaw puzzle, so you can make endless combinations in any order you want. There are many brands of waffle building blocks, Gakken and Plus Plus are the most popular and well-known ones. This, however, is rarer MALYSH building blocks set.
Blocks by different manufacturers may look different. In Plus Plus sets, for example, all blocks are exactly the same, the only difference is color. This old ex-USSR set, however, has pieces of differnet shapes, and some extras, like figurines or wheels. There are also a number of long, bar-like pieces that help connect waffle blocks together. You can stack many waffles on one bar, which helps to create thick and solid crafts.
The waffle blocks themselves are small, each side of a block has only one or two pegs. Some blocks has H-shape and no pegs at all on some sides. This is a downside, because you can’t connect anything on these sides. Sometimes, however, these pieces are very handy, because you can stuck them in small openings to support the craft around it. It all other regards, it is a typical waffle block building kit with small pieces.
An exoctic flower we made from a Tiko set.
Pythagoras, Tiko, and Tako are vintage building sets. They have big panels of different colors and shapes, that connect by the edges. Each piece has sockets and balls that can snap together, connecting the pieces. You can also connect the pieces of different shapes, as long as their sides match. This connection is strong enough to hold even the biggest structures together.
Because of the sockets’ form, Pythagoras and Tiko panels can form both flat surfaces and 3D shapes. The flexible joint connection means that you can connect the pieces at different angles. The bigger panels are huge – they are a few inches long, so kids can create toy hats or items to hold, and not just toys. They are sturdy enough to wear and to play with. There also are smaller pieces that can help connect the bigger pannels together or make smaller crafts. The pieces of this set have all kinds of shapes – there are different triangles, rectangles, squares, pentagons, and so on, all in different colors.
Sadly, Amazon seemingly has no sets exactly like Tiko and Pythagoras, but some very similar concepts also are interesting enough.
A bicycle our Zoob set offered to build in a manual.
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 a Zoob set, 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.
This set is more than a building kit, this is, as the manufacturer puts it, an education system. This Guidecraft IO Blocks Center set includes building blocks and a real child-sized wooden table with storage bins!
The table in this set is very similar to the common adult tables, with the storage shelves in usual places – except these deep plastic boxes hold building toys and not papers. The table surface itself is a construction baseplate – it has holes to fix the pieces. This allows the gears to rotate in their positions, and your kids can build bigger crafts without them falling apart.
The building set itself has big, chunky pieces of different shapes. They have thick square pegs and crevices that can snap together and can connect the pieces in different positions. The set also includes bent slide pieces, axis parts, and figurines. The figures look like cubic Lego people, except they have no moving legs.
Overall, this is an ambitious and unusual set. It has great potential, but buying the whole table for just one building set brand can easily be an overkill for many families. The table itself has very specific holds, so you can’t use many sets with it – pieces from lots of building toys simply won’t match these square holes.
A sporty K’Nex bird on a windowsill.
This is one of the countless Chinese clones of Zoob sets. Afomida building set has piece of the same shapes and size the original Zoob has, including the rotating wheels with rubber tires. The plastic of this set is somewhat cheap, but there are 125 pieces, and the set comes in a handy plastic box, so it can be a good travel option.
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.
This is one of the bigger Kid K’Nex sets. It has 100 pieces – both typical K’Nex flakes and rods, as well as extra pieces like eyes, horns and ears. This is one of the many proposed creatures.
The table in Guidecraft blocks center is big enough only for toddlers, but it’s still an actual piece of furniture! Whis photo by the manufacturer shows the size of this table.
This set is more than a building kit, this is, as the manufacturer puts it, an education system. This Guidecraft IO Blocks Center set includes building blocks and a real child-sized wooden table with storage bins!
The table in this set is very similar to the common adult tables, with the storage shelves in usual places – except these deep plastic boxes hold building toys and not papers. The table surface itself is a construction baseplate – it has holes to fix the pieces. This allows the gears to rotate in their positions, and your kids can build bigger crafts without them falling apart.
The building set itself has big, chunky pieces of different shapes. They have thick square pegs and crevices that can snap together and can connect the pieces in different positions. The set also includes bent slide pieces, axis parts, and figurines. The figures look like cubic Lego people, except they have no moving legs.
Overall, this is an ambitious and unusual set. It has great potential, but buying the whole table for just one building set brand can easily be an overkill for many families. The table itself has very specific holds, so you can’t use many sets with it – pieces from lots of building toys simply won’t match these square holes.
Or an alien? Another weird K’Nex creature posing against a wall.
