STEM learning made fun: domino robots, problem-solving, and screen-free play

Disclaimer: The Hape Domino Robot Factory and Strictly Briks sets were gifted to us for review. As always, all opinions are my own.

STEM learning arrived in our house with a bang. Or, more accurately, the deeply satisfying clatter of several wooden dominoes hitting the floor. At two-and-three-quarters, Cyrus was conducting his own experiments before anybody thought to put the word STEM on the box. His research interests included gravity, throwing, dismantling and discovering how much structural pressure something could withstand before collapsing.

A rainy Saturday seemed a good opportunity to give all that destructive curiosity a slightly more educational direction with the Hape Domino Robot Factory. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, although with very young children I think the terminology matters rather less than the principle behind it. They build something, it falls down, they change something and try again. That, in miniature, is problem-solving.

There is also a little family significance. H is an engineer, so engineering has never felt like some remote profession involving hard hats and mysterious equations in our house. We wanted Cyrus to grow up interested about how things work, without making his childhood feel like an unusually early university entrance programme.

At this age, I am less interested in whether Cyrus can name gravity than whether he wants to experiment with it.

Our mini mohandes, the Farsi word for engineer, needed very little persuasion. The Hape set uses dominoes, ramps, tracks and a bright red tipper truck to create different chain reactions. Cyrus quickly began experimenting with what went where, what moved and, most importantly, what could be made to crash into something else. One wooden ball disappeared under the sofa with impressive efficiency.

What I liked was that the play did not depend on Cyrus reproducing one perfect model. He could move pieces around, alter the track and discover what happened next. At his age, that process of trial and error is far more interesting to me than whether he can identify something as gravity. He doesn’t need to know the terminology. He needs the opportunity to wonder what happens when he puts something somewhere else, and then try it.

I am wary of claiming that every wooden toy turns a toddler into a budding scientist. Sometimes a domino is just something enormously satisfying to knock over, but toys such as this do create opportunities for children to explore cause and effect.

He also had to use his hands carefully enough to position the pieces without demolishing everything prematurely. The set kept him away from a screen without requiring me to perform an elaborate programme of wholesome family entertainment.

There were balls rolling, dominoes toppling and ramps clattering while I managed to drink a cup of coffee before it became completely cold. Educational progress all round.

The other consideration with any toy aimed at small children is whether it survives small children. The wooden pieces felt sturdy and substantial in little hands, with the reassuring feel of something designed for repeated play rather than one enthusiastic Saturday afternoon.

There are, however, plenty of separate pieces, and balls have an ability to migrate beneath furniture. This is not a toy I would choose if your definition of relaxing play is opening one box and retrieving one object afterwards. For us, though, the mess was manageable because Cyrus remained interested in what he was building.

Strictly Briks takes a different route to much the same destination. Instead of tracks and dominoes, the emphasis is on construction. The bricks can be stacked into towers and free-form structures, giving children plenty of opportunity to discover the brutal realities of balance. Build too high without a decent base and the whole thing comes down, and there is something satisfyingly uncomplicated about that lesson.

The Brik Tower encourages children to experiment with height, shape and stability. There is no need for the finished creation to resemble the picture on a box. Children can build, dismantle and rebuild, which is precisely where much of the useful thinking happens.

It also has the nostalgic appeal of the building toys many of us grew up with, except now I apparently watch Cyrus constructing a tower and think about spatial reasoning rather than simply wondering how long it will be before I stand on a brick. This is what becoming a parent does to you.

There is now an enormous market for toys promising to make children cleverer, more creative or better prepared for some distant technological future. I am not convinced toddlers need quite that much pressure attached to their toy boxes.

The best thing about both sets is not that they announce themselves as educational. It is that Cyrus wanted to play with them, and the learning happened because he was curious enough to keep experimenting. That distinction matters. A toy can contain every educational principle imaginable, but if a child abandons it after six minutes in favour of the cardboard box, its academic credentials become rather theoretical.

The Hape Domino Robot Factory was the stronger hit in our house because movement, noise and things falling over are extremely persuasive when you are nearly three. It encouraged Cyrus to experiment rather than simply follow instructions, and there were enough different components to change the game each time. Strictly Briks offered a quieter version of the same idea, with building, balance and spatial problem-solving at the centre of the play.

Neither toy needs to turn a toddler into an engineer. For me, their value is much simpler: they encourage children to build something, wonder what will happen, watch it go wrong and try another way. That feels much closer to genuine learning than simply attaching the STEM label to a toy box.

Given that Cyrus’s daddy is an engineer, perhaps our little mohandes was already following family tradition. Or perhaps he just really enjoyed knocking things over. At two-and-three-quarters, I think either answer is perfectly acceptable.

Four stars from us. The Hape set offered plenty of scope for repeat play and experimentation, while Strictly Briks made building wonderfully open-ended. The sheer number of pieces means neither is entirely tidy-parent territory, and the Hape set sat at the more expensive end of toddler toys when we reviewed it. But both succeeded at the thing that matters most: Cyrus actually wanted to play with them.

Perhaps the best STEM toy is simply the one that makes a child curious enough to ask, “What happens if I do this?”

Join the conversation: Do STEM toys earn their place in your house, or do your children learn just as much from ordinary building blocks, cardboard boxes and whatever else they can dismantle?

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and rabbit holes from Saffron & Cyrus.