7.Genderization

This New Girl-Powered Engineering Toy Asks Kids To Design And WireTheir Own DollhouseBy Sydney BrownstoneWith Roominate's pastel-colored Lincoln Logs for the 21st century, little girls are inspiredbuild what's in their imaginations and learn electrical circuitry, too.In many ways, little girls growing up in the United States today will have more freedom to determine theirfutures than ever. So why are they still aggressively marketed the same plastic pooping babies, Pepto-pinkponies, and anatomically outrageous dolls from 50 years ago?Research increasingly shows that early childhood play shapes our skills, values, and modes of thinking as wegrow older. But while products like Goldie Blox have started to deconstruct the age-old assumption thatlittle girls simply don’t like building things, choices are still limited.Now Roominate, a new toy designed by female Stanford University engineering grads, offers anotheralternative: the first wired dollhouse that kids build on their own. It's one of the few tools, gendered or not,that comes with electric circuits and few rules.Bettina Chen and Alice Brooks, engineeringgraduates from the California Institute ofTechnology and the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology respectively, met within their firstfew days of master's programs at StanfordUniversity, they say, because there weren’tmany other girls. “That was actually one of thefirst conversations we had. Why didn’t any ofour other female friends do engineering?” Chensays. “And then we considered that it was thethings that we played with while we wereyounger that really inspired us.”For Brooks, the building bug set in when she first asked her father if Santa Claus might bring her someBarbies for Christmas. He was appalled at the idea, and gave his then-eight-year-old daughter a miniaturesaw instead. “He sent me off into the basement, and I was making dolls, and dinosaurs, and doll houses,”she remembers. “The act of figuring it out, realizing when I made a mistake and how I could go around it,that’s what really got me into engineering.”More than a year after receiving nearly $86,000 through Kickstarter to build the initial product, Chen andBrooks are displaying Roominate at Manhattan’s annual Toy Fair this week. The set, manufactured in China,comes with various shapes for walls, floors, modular furniture, as well as coated, AAA battery-poweredcircuits designed for six-year-old fingers to put together.284 She Culture CRT: Genderization