What do Pulley Skeeball, Rampage, Launcher, Pegboard Pulley, and The Elevator Game have in common? They are exciting new gender-neutral educational toys developed by the students in Engineering 100 as part of the ToyTech project.

TOYTech (Teaching Our Youth Technology ) began last winter when 80 local middle-schoolers were invited to campus to brainstorm with Smith engineering students and faculty ideas for inventions that would improve lives by using technology and would appeal to both boys and girls. Working on this principle, Smith students, under the guidance of Professors Borjana Mikic and Domenico Grasso, were then charged with developing toys that were fun, marketable, gender-neutral, and that taught technology principles. (View models developed by last year’s class.)

This year, fifteen teams from the three sections of Engineering 101 took up the challenge again, developing toys propelled by propulsion, liquid, gears, or pulleys. They worked in collaboration with Al Rudnitsky and the teachers and 2nd, 5th, and 6th graders at the Campus School to develop interactive "immersion" modules for science eduction.

At the end the fall term, the students presented their models to their classmates. Each of the fifteen teams had designed three prototypes and, after a series of tests and trials, had selected one to develop further. As part of the process, they had collaborated with community partners, met with faculty, tested their inventions extensively on their family and friends, and developed evaluation metrics and plans for marketing research. The results are remarkable.

In April, Professor Mikic will be traveling to California with three of the first year students, Jie Zheng, Katherine Pratt, and Reja Amatya, to present their work at the annual Virtual Development Center conference sponsored by the Institute for Women and Technology.