Growing up my favorite toys were Legos, Pokémon/Yu-gi-oh cards and Nintendo 64. Playing with Legos was one of my favorite activities. I would build small towns, or robots and interact with them through Legos. This is very similar to the idea behind our DecoBlocks. As I played with and used Legos, building villages and fantasy worlds or forming patterns, I learned to perceive and understand space while developing creativity. For the card games they helped me develop my basic arithmetic and for each game you would have to mentally keep track of how much life your cards had and had to quickly add and subtract in my head. Also, the cards had secondary market value so I would trade and sell them. Looking back on it now in a way this was kind of like trading stock and creating arbitrage in markets where people did not have full information. Sometimes I would be able to trade for a rare card because one of the other kids did not realize its value. So I guess in a way that’s what started my interest in business and the stock markets. In a way everything I played with growing up was definitely reinforcing gender roles and advertised towards boys while I was growing up. However, I feel Legos have recently tried to reach both genders.
As I stated early the DecoBlocks are very similar to Legos. In my mind they are a blend between Legos and Lincoln Logs. I personally do not feel that toys and stories or movies need to explicitly try and market for both genders. To me if a child is interested in a toy they wouldn’t really care or understand fundamentally that a toy is “meant for” boys or girls. So long as the toys don’t say “this toy is meant only for boys” I do not think advertising needs to overly try and gender blend advertisements. However, I do feel children should be exposed to STEM and positive gender roles and expectations early in order to promote diversity and equality. If children are raised showing that both genders are equal and that all fields are interesting I feel the world will develop faster and everyone will be more accepting in the future.
programming ethics 