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Comment by cullenking | Hacker News Reader

All the naysayers out there are neglecting an important viewpoint best explained by a personal anecdote. I have a 4 year old niece that is so into princesses, pink, high heals, the whole 9 yards, that any present that isn't themed pink and girly will just get ignored, yet she's very smart and likes playing with puzzles. Something like this might actually work for her, where gender neutral legos or erector sets would never get played with.

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To this point there seems to be strong and widespread anecdotal evidence that many boys don't want to seem to much like girls by playing with "girly" toys and many girls feel the same way towards "boys" toys. There is perhaps (or perhaps not) a problem with this phenomenon that, over time, needs to be addressed. In the meantime things like this seem to be a great way to spread interest in science and engineering among both genders.

It's not just anecdotal [1] (forgive the article for misspelling "light saber"). Toy companies have known this for some time. It's how they make money.

NPR had several interesting discussions regarding the controversy over girl-themed Legos, and gender in toys [2][3].

1: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1457051...

2: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1603654...

3: http://www.npr.org/2012/01/18/145397007/gender-controversy-s...

My first reaction when I saw this campaign was to roll my eyes a bit, to be honest. My own daughter loves the gender neutral and even "boyish" construction toys, and even though she loves ponies and princesses and pink frilly things, she'd probably cast something like this aside.

On reflection though, I think anything that helps get girls interested in the concepts is fantastic. This simply wouldn't be of value to my own daughter (or my nieces for that matter), but I can see how it would be really helpful in getting girls like your niece interested, and that can only be a good thing.

I almost wrote a comment about how it was basically just making erector sets pink, and what was the point of that. You've made me think twice.

However, I feel like parents who are inclined to buy this might not be likely to have princess-obsessed kids. But I am not a parent, so I don't know.

I have two daughters ... both princess-obsessed. I trip over Barbies some days!

My knee-jerk response to that: Do they make pink girly legos? Maybe there are reasons why that's the wrong approach, but I tend to regard interaction and packaging as two very distinct design components. If the packaging is the problem, fix that first.

Changing the interaction should come second. Dumbing it down is almost never the solution, yet it's often the first solution people turn to when trying to deal with a gender gap. It's as if they think the issues will go away if they speak very slowly and loudly.

(I admire the objective, but I believe I would like the project better if it said "an engineering toy" instead of "the engineering toy." The implication differs.)

"Do they make pink girly legos?"

Why yes, yes they do: http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx

They're controversial for the same reasons people are complaining on this thread, but they're selling. (See http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/09/lego-friends-tr...)

My experience is limited to sisters, but they played with the normal legos just as much as I did. I suspect these would have been a hit.

Users care about things like color far more than engineers often suspect. If changing the color makes a substantive improvement to outcomes you care about - change the color.

I think there's a bit more to this toy than simply 'pink it and shrink it' as they say in retail.

The story + building is the innovation - meeting girls where they are and presenting construction/engineering themes through something other than a jumble of Legos. (This coming from a girl who loved Legos but didn't end up as an engineer)

Buy Lego friends. They're pretty good 'girlie' sets.

A friend's niece reports "LEGO Friends are too easy," but she's the kind of kid who builds the Grand Emporium all by herself.

My daughter loves things like the Pet Shop: http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Pet-Shop-10218

Really fun to build.

The reason I like Lego is because I can build stuff with her. Especially when we decide to build something "off-piste".

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