Hasta La Ideas

I don’t know about you, but I still find it shocking to see toddlers walking around with smartphones. Instead of scoffing, Steve Cozzolino saw opportunity. At a fateful dinner party, Cozzolino noticed that eight out of nine children were playing around on some kind of digital device (including a set of 1-year-old twins on an iPhone). At the time, he was in the process of creating Nickster, a physical toy set (inspired by his son Nick) on a Kickstarter mission, which now consists of a physical toy set and a themed app to teach kids basic principles of building, matching shapes and counting. But it was in these digital mavericks—who could barely walk but could tap and swipe—that Cozzolino realized that saw the future of play: In order to be engaging and relevant to today’s youth, he needed to create something with a digital component. “What’s most unique and innovative about the Nickster Playland app is that it connects children back to physical toys,” Cozzolino says. “It encourages them to not just play in the digital world, but also have fun with their toys.”

The toys and app don’t just stop teaching after a few lessons. “What’s nice about the app is that it allows us to build upon the toys by creating an endless number of color and shape combinations and added levels of difficulty, all opportunities to learn more,” Cozzolino says. “For example, the Sequence Train toy is 1-4 while the Sequence Train app is 1-5, 1-10 and the complete alphabet.”

(more…)