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Today’s toys aren’t just marbles, jump rope and jacks: kids can now program solar-powered robots to navigate mazes, turn on the lights or get a snack from the fridge.
“Someone programmed the Lego Mindstorm to flush the toilet and say thank you,” said Out of the Blue Toy Store co-manager Cariad Owen. “One of them could draw a replica of the Mona Lisa, because it uses just computer programming. You can make it as complicated as you want.”
Out of the Blue Toys, a 23-year-old specialty toy store, carries everything from 10-cent mini dice to the $300 Lego Mindstorm. The shelves are lined with dolls in pink boxes, 3-foot-tall dollhouses and Mr. Bubble Bathtub Ice Cream Shoppe kits, a toy that makes foam ice cream in the bath.
High-tech and solar-powered toys are a fairly new commodity, according to Owen and co-manager Lisa Gallegos.
“I’m not sure everything that was out there when I was 5 or 6, but the array of things — science kits for example — there’s just everything you would think of,” Owen said. “I don’t remember having access to anything like that when I was a kid.”
Gallegos said that decades ago, science projects and games were theoretical and couldn’t be realized by the kids thinking them up.
But now kids have the tools to make everything.
“You would enter these competitions and stuff and see if they would work and see who would win, but it was never anything this cool that you could do yourself,” Gallegos said. “We’d have these hypothetical ideas, but it’s not like you could actually do it.”
Gallegos said many of Out of the Blue’s interactive, specialty toys are not available in big box stores. They don’t just follow movie fads, and she said their toys are more long-lasting and safer than many toys from corporations. Owen said some of the dangers of corporate toys include strangulation and choking.
“Sometimes I’ll see that at a big box store there’s a huge list of things that have been recalled,” Gallegos said. “There’s been this hazard in glue that hasn’t been tested or something, and that just really freaks me out.”
All of Out of the Blue’s products are tested by the managers for safety, durability and age-appropriateness.
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“We are these nerds about toys and we learn a lot about everything in the store,” Gallegos said. “A lot of parents want to buy games for really young children, and we are like ‘Well, this one’s really more of a cooperation game, waiting your turn, respecting other people.’”
Education is innate to all toys, Owen said, because kids learn in all types of situations.
“Some people come in and say they want ‘educational,’ but I think everything’s educational,” Owen said. “Play, creativity, having fun, it’s all educational. It helps establish your outlook and how you’re going through life logically.”
Gallegos said kids usually don’t even realize they are learning when they play. Children frequently call Gallegos by phone, and she watches them grow up. She speaks fondly of Andres, a 6-year-old boy who likes dinosaurs.
“I’ve known Andres since he was really little — he’s really smart and we have a really great rapport,” Gallegos said. “He still wonders if I know him and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me right now? Of course I know you, come on.’ You can tell this kid is really smart and amazing and you’re glad to recommend the things that form his childhood.”
