Bokah Blocks: An Educational Tool
Bokah Blocks was created to fulfill an important educational objective in the realm of building toys. A wooden construction toy, Bokah Blocks exists to aid the development of spatial intelligence, cognitive abilities and creative expression of children. At that, our purpose is to provide the best possible and most memorable constructional learning experiences for children and adults alike. To help cultivate the brilliant minds of tomorrow, Bokah Blocks aims to improve and expand the educational value of building toys.
Learning through Playing
Playing is the “work” children do to discover, understand and navigate the world around them. For that reason, the nature and quality of their exposure to play scenarios matters. Having hands-on building experiences while growing up helps them develop critical skills that can benefit them throughout their entire life.
"Bokah Blocks promotes all
learners in developing their own creative and
imaginative problem solving skills."
Bokah Blocks focuses on providing a fresh, user-friendly, and inexhaustible playing method to foster and improve spatial thinking, fine and gross motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and the creative reasoning of children four years and older. It has the ability to sustain the cognitive and imaginative interest of children, while engaging them in growing complexities of playing experiences in years to come. This grow-with-me factor allows the learning process to extend beyond age limit. Bokah Blocks promotes all learners in developing their own creative and imaginative problem solving skills.
Spatial Intelligence and Spatial Thinking
When people can easily picture in their minds how three-dimensional objects may rotate or relate to each other in space, they are capable of spatial thinking. We can say they possess a developed sense of spatial intelligence. Architects, engineers, artists, industrial designers all depend on this valuable skill in their professions. Renowned architect, Frank Lloyd Wright attributed his outstanding spatial skills to playing with wooden building blocks as a child and as an adult. Nor should it come as a surprise that it was his son, John that invented the now iconic building blocks toy, the Lincoln Logs. Standing on the shoulders of giants, Bokah Blocks intends to lead children’s spatial learning experiences into a new and exciting territory.
"Bokah Blocks intends to lead
children's spatial learning experiences
into a new and exciting territory."
Bokah Blocks helps to develop and cultivate children’s spatial intelligence by offering multi-directional building options. Unlike traditional stacking toys of this category, our toy can be used for a broader range of spatial explorations. Bokah-constructs can grow vertically, horizontally, and angularly, all made possible by our patented Bendy joints.
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Our flexible Bendy joints are the most inventive aspects of Bokah Blocks. Different types of Bendy joints can be made. Depending on the intention of the builder, a Bendy joint may serve either to firmly extend the length of one block with another, or to provide a rotating mechanism between two or more blocks. Bendys can create static structures and moveable parts, which are exclusive features of Bokah Blocks.
Open-Ended Play and Imaginative What-If Scenarios
Bokah Blocks is a wooden construction toy that invites boys and girls alike to build anything they envision. They can model their constructs after real life objects, but they can also build imaginary things. Bokah Blocks is the perfect tool to support pretend-play, abstract construction, and what-if scenarios because the built structures are quickly revisable, moveable, portable, and even wearable. The versatile nature of Bokah Blocks makes it ideal for open-ended and interactive play.
Independent Play and Social Interaction
Bokah Blocks satisfies the need for both: To build in solitude and to join other builders in play. With Bokah Blocks, any individual play session can lead to meaningful group activities. Single builds can be collectively designed into multifaceted structures.
Engaging Activity for
Adults to Play Along
When adults join children in play, special bonds are created. Such shared experiences do not only increase the confidence and self-esteem of young learners, but also allow adults to enter into the imaginative worlds children create. Bokah Blocks has the power to sustain the attention of anyone at any age: Meaningful spatial and cognitive challenges have no age limit. And which is more: Children can feel safe and secure knowing their parents, grandparents, older siblings, or teachers all care to play along and appreciate the shared experience of creative activity.
Self-Expression & Creativity
Bokah Blocks has only two basic parts: The Bokah and the Bendy. But make no mistake: Even though Bokah Blocks is simple in design, it is not simplistic.
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Requiring no daunting pieces, construction is intuitive and easy. Building abstract or real-life forms, and geometric or organic structures are all equally possible. With Bokah Blocks, there is no right or wrong way to play. The educational value lies in freedom of expression, exploration, discovery, playful learning, and unconstrained demonstration of creativity. The inviting nature of Bokah Blocks fosters and encourages ingenuity at all levels.
Spatial Vocabulary for Science-Based Education
A number of relevant research in child development points toward the importance of developing children’s spatial intelligence from an early age by way of exposure to spatial vocabulary. The possession of such skills prepares children for successful performance in the fields of mathematics, science, technology, engineering and design. Building with Bokah Blocks facilitates the teaching of spatial properties –such as line, shape, space, straight, flat, curvy-linear, as well as spatial dimensions like small, big, tall, narrow, empty, airy, full, long, proportional, etc. The use of spatial vocabulary and spatial talk can be made an integral part of Bokah experiences in educational settings.
Natural Toy and Free Play
We live in an age of apps where the digitalization of children’s playing activities is happening in lightning speed. We at Bokah Blocks appreciate the educational and entertainment value of many computer based toy products. Bokah Blocks itself wouldn’t exist without our dependence on computer technology. Indeed, the digital screen is a substantial part of the Bokah DNA.
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However, we also strongly believe that playing with physical toys contributes to immeasurable and long-lasting benefits for a young learner’s life. To help establish a better balance between digital and analog toys, the Bokah team set out to develop a viable option to alternate between free play and screen-bound playtime.
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Bokah Blocks invites everyone to engage in self-choreographed, mentally exercising, and physically motivating playing experiences. Such free and spontaneous activities are imperative toward healthy development.
"When playing with Bokah Blocks,
kids can come up with their own unscripted
pretend-play scenarios. No predetermined
endings. No virtual buttons to push."
Bokah Blocks is a simple, sophisticated and multi-level construction toy with an array of new possibilities such as rotational, moveable, portable and wearable functions. It can be used in- and outdoors, so as to allow children to flex their creative muscles in various circumstances. When playing with Bokah Blocks, kids can come up with their own unscripted pretend-play scenarios. No predetermined endings. No virtual buttons to push. Instead, Bokah offers an unlimited number of structural constructions and socially interactive play options.
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Bokah Blocks allows kids to envision the direction of play, make decisions as they go, and change their minds as they see fit. With Bokah Blocks, they can control the flow of activities, assign personal roles & responsibilities, and make up or discard their own rules.
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This toy aids children in fun, free, and active explorations and surprising discoveries. Bokah Blocks activates the imagination and provides benefits of intellectual development and emotional growth.
Gender-Neutral Toy
When developing Bokah Blocks, – the toy and the brand, – we took cues from contemporary discourse in developmental psychology regarding the negative effects of gender-coded toys. Our product set out to address this very issue. If our product was to lead construction toys into a new era, we at Bokah Blocks had to recognize the concern that gender-coded toys appear to interfere with healthy child development.
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Lots of toys are either marketed to boys or girls, but not both. Those are gender-coded toys. Even though such toys appeal to and are enjoyed by their targeted audience, the socially sanctioned coding serves to limit their broader availability. Such toys fail to facilitate adequately the intellectual, cognitive, spatial, nurturing, and creative development of all children. They either favor boys or girls alone.
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This leads to another problem: Gender-coded toys effectively restrict children’s opportunity to fully explore gender-roles while they play. Typically, toys geared toward boys allow for freer and more imaginative symbolic-, pretend-, and fantasy play possibilities than toys marketed to girls. At the same time toys, color-coded for girls, tend to exclude boys from exploring gender roles with a domestic and nurturing focus. These purposeful exclusions imposed by the design of the toy itself, cause gender role explorations to be lopsided, personally limiting, and socially harmful.
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What should, then, be the attributes of a new-breed of construction toys if it is to eliminate gender typing while fully supporting the gender development of all children? In some toys, these objectives may be easier to meet than others. However, completely overcoming the masculine stereotype culturally attached to construction toys still remains quite a challenge, in spite of some successful attempts in recent years.
"Bokah Blocks is not just for boys,
nor is it just for girls. Bokah Blocks is for
everyone because building is for everyone."
Based on such concerns, Bokah Blocks needed to be gender-neutral in looks and feel, and non-restrictive in its appeal and accessibility. From the beginning of its development, Bokah Blocks had been modeled to overcome traditionally established gender norms. With Bokah Blocks, all children can build freely and use their constructions to act out boundless roles. Girls are just as much invited into building fantastical things as boys.
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Meanwhile, boys are welcome to explore the more practical and nurturing sides of adult roles, typically assigned to girls. With Bokah Blocks, girls too, can build airplanes and pretend to be astronauts and engineers. At the same time, boys can build houses and pretend to be chefs, artists, doctors and more.
Bokah Blocks is a versatile and inclusive construction toy, providing all children freedom of opportunity to explore and enjoy building without socially sanctioned pressures. Our aim is to eliminate such constraints and open up new avenues toward creative development and spatial learning of all children. Bokah Blocks is not just for boys, nor is it just for girls. Bokah Blocks is for everyone because building is for everyone.
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Leo & Lele, our brand ambassadors demonstrate the new and all-inclusive, gender-neutral approach Bokah Blocks takes to construction toys. They are a quintessential example of the autonomy that boys and girls have in controlling their own roles. They stand for the annulment of sociocultural gender boundaries assigned by society and perpetuated by gender-coded toys. They together, Leo & Lele, are the active agents of the Bokah Blocks story and the charming agency of the Bokah Blocks brand.
