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15 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 21 SEPTEMBER 2022 WORLD But there's a problem: there are no more long blocks left on the shelf. The children have used them all. One of the boys looks around, and after a moment of deep thought, a look of recog- nition spreads across his face. You can almost see the light bulb flash. He takes two smaller blocks and connects them to- gether. Now, "this is a long one," the boy says, triumphant. Prob- lem solved; the tower grows. The precocious boys were being filmed by researchers at Eastern Connecticut State University's Center for Early Childhood Edu- cation. They were part of a long- term study of preschool children called TIMPANI, or Toys That Inspire Mindful Play and Nur- ture Imagination. From 2010 to 2019, TIMPANI researchers put kids together in rooms and observed how they interacted— with toys and with one another. A generation of kids built whim- sical Duplo houses and elaborate marble runs. They pretended to run stores, bakeries, and ice cream shops, with all the requi- site props. Simple toys proved especially popular, the research- ers found, and those old-timey blocks, cars, people, and shapes seemed to yield the most imag- inative play. Julia DeLapp, the centre's di- rector, says that while there's been lots of research on how children play and how play af- fects a child's development, less attention has been paid to the toys themselves. Each year, Eastern used its findings to crown a "TIMPANI Toy of the Year," and it proba- bly won't come as a surprise that many are certifiable classics: Hot Wheels, Duplo bricks, Tinker- toys. "The reason they're still around is because they are fab- ulous toys. They allow children to use their imagination. They're very open ended," says DeLapp. The study consistently found that construction toys (like Lego or Tinkertoy) and replica toys (fire trucks, stuffed animals, and dolls) produced the most imag- inative and creative play. The less restrictive and more flex- ible the toy, the better. In one example, the researchers found that a wooden cash register en- couraged children to talk about buying and selling items, where- as an electronic one with lights and sounds encouraged them to press buttons instead—more en- tertainment than engagement. "The more open ended a toy is, the more room there is for chil- dren to make it anything they want [it] to be," says DeLapp. Many of the items on TIM- PANI's list can also be found in the National Toy Hall of Fame, a shrine to fun housed at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Though not academically rigorous by any means, the hall of fame has in- ducted seventy-seven toys since its creation in 1998. In its first year, it welcomed Play-Doh, Monopoly, Etch A Sketch, Barbie, Erector set, Lego, and Tinkertoy. Later years have added Mr. Potato Head, Slinky, Tonka trucks, and Rubik's Cube. All were chosen based on a mix of popularity, longevity, and the quality of play. But the hall of fame has also inducted a handful of items that aren't toys in the commercial sense: objects like "stick," "ball," "sand," and "card- board box." All parents know that kids love boxes. "You can go in it, you could go on it, you can draw on it, you can cut it apart. It could be anything. It affords a lot of different types of play," says Barry Kudrowitz, a professor at the University of Minnesota. He has taught toy design for elev- en years and is the author of a forthcoming book about play and innovation. Kudrowitz says that, much like the humble box, the toys and games we most often think of as classics are the ones kids can fig- ure out on their own, regardless of the cultural or social contexts around them. Imagine a time traveller encountering a Rubik's Cube for the first time. "The size of it is going to say, 'Pick me up,' because it's designed to fit ex- actly in your hand," he says. It doesn't take much to realize the cube moves and to notice the different colours on each of the squares. "It's only a few steps before you start making a game out of it and realize that there's a challenge to it," he explains. It's similar to how it doesn't take much to infer the relationship between a basketball and a hoop or what happens when you turn the knobs of an Etch A Sketch. The constraints guide the player, but there's enough free- dom and challenge to keep them coming back. It's no wonder the robot WALL-E, in Pixar's epony- mous 2008 film, could figure out how to play with a Rubik's Cube some 800 years after humans left Earth behind. Of course, a Rubik's Cube is al- so more than just a well-designed puzzle; in Kudrowitz's words, it's the embodiment of what is now a classic play pattern: challenge play. Other patterns include replica play, co-operative play, competitive play, pretend play, construction play, creative play, or nurturing play—there's no single, agreed-upon classifica- tion—but what's important is that these ways of engaging with the world haven't really changed much over time. A Nerf ball gets a certain amount of its power from its tactility, design, and marketing—but also from the fact that humans, all over the world, have been playing with balls since time immemorial. Or consider the act of jumping rope; Egyptians were using vines for skipping games in 1600 BCE. Ben Varadi was about 10 when he saw a Rubik's Cube for the first time. Hungarian designer Ernő Rubik invented his special cube in 1974, and by the time Varadi encountered it, in the '80s, it was already a hit. The Spin Master co-founder grew up in north Toronto and spent hours each week at a store called The Toy Man while his mom ran errands nearby. Shelf by shelf, he would study every item, and he remembers the small, colour- ful cube catching his eye. Af- ter Varadi grew up and entered the toy business himself, he saw first-hand how those childhood impressions stick with a person and help keep classic toys like Rubik's Cube alive. Spin Master has stiff competi- tion in the industry, as two of the biggest players, Hasbro and Mat- tel, are practically classic incar- nate. Both rose to prominence in the early to mid-twentieth centu- ry and possess deep catalogues of legacy toys (Easy-Bake Oven, Jen- ga, and Potato Head for Hasbro; Fisher-Price, Hot Wheels, and Barbie for Mattel). For a com- paratively young company like Spin Master, acquisitions are the only way to keep up. When Spin Master considers an acquisition, long-term margins and profita- bility are significant factors, as is the time it will take to pay off the investment. "The life cycle in toys is often two or three years. And [as a company] you don't want to buy things that are only going to be around two or three years," says Chris Beardall, a twenty-year Spin Master veteran and its chief commercial officer. Spin Master, like many pub- licly traded companies, doesn't disclose revenue or sales for in- dividual brands or items. But, based on its public financial filings, sales in the activities, games, puzzles, and plush cate- gory—where many of its classics are counted—have more than doubled since 2015.