K’Nex Education. 6 -14 years. K’Nex connectors look like little segments of sunbursts, which has always made them seem like the happiest of toys on the shelf. At the same time, the kits pack some of the heaviest educational punch, with names that sound like textbooks: Introduction to Structures, Introduction to Simple Machines, Force and Newton’s Laws, DNA Replications and Transcriptions, etc. Kids can build functional machinery and submit it to all the phases of the design process; moreover, the kits are aligned to Common Core standards. As sophisticated a set of learning toys as you’ll find.
Roominate. 6 – 12 years. Designed by two women engineers, Roominate combines simple circuitry-making with modular building pieces to let kids design and build dollhouses that go beyond the typical. They can build entire structures plus the furniture and objects that go inside, then add motor and light circuits to bring the whole thing to life. Drawing on engineering in many dimensions, the kits are designed to attract girls from early elementary school and older to the field.
Mindware KEVA Contraptions. 7 – 15 years. A simple approach – lightweight wooden planks plus two metal balls, with the rest up to imagination and experimentation. The planks can combine to take all kinds of forms – tunnels, funnels, chutes, platforms, drops – for the balls to roll through, if the contraption is designed and assembled properly. The game teaches as much about dealing with design failures as it does about physics, gravity and building principles. Add-ons include a wrecking ball, catapult and trebuchet, if you want to make the transitions from one structure to the next a bit more dramatic.
Source: Eric Iverson at start-engineering.com