See Toys: Kid Power, Not Batteries

See Toys is a new line of toys powered by hand-crank dynamos rather than batteries. The company behind them, Zen Design Group, is based in Detroit and headed by Sun Yu, an inventor and entrepreneur who co-founded the company and developed this first line of toys. They hold a patent on the power-generating method they developed for the toys, and these cute toys have been several years in the making. The hand crank shown here flips and tucks into the bug's hind segment when not in use, like the handle of a pair of nail clippers.

From the name forward, this toy's agenda is explicitly progressive. The "See" in See Toys is a hidden acronym for "Safe, Environmental, and Efficient," and Sun Yu tells anyone who will listen that the future of "powered" toys lies in kid power, particularly toys which do not require batteries.

The company sent us their Dynafly to play with.

The Dynafly makes a buzzing sound when the button on its back is depressed, and its eyes, back and tail light up with nice bright LEDs. The eyes in particular caught us by surprise - they are bright enough to use as a modest flashlight, and our Dynafly has actually seen a lot of use peering underneath appliances to look for stray marbles and "little balls."

The Dynafly's four arms are moderately poseable, and the wings can be moved somewhat, but otherwise this is a simple carry-it-around-flying kind of toy. We aren't easily convinced of the value of a toy's simply making noise for the sake of making noise - kids are plenty good at supplying sound effects themselves. But the lights have proven mesmerizing for Z, and we like that it doubles as a functional flashlight that never needs batteries.

Our only complaint about the Dynafly is that we found the paint to be a bit chippy, even with light use.

See Toys also makes dolphins whose mouths inexplicably light up (I guess an insect with light-up eyes is no more logical!) and cars. The full line is available at the Zen Design online store for $20-$30 apiece.

It's worth observing here, in the spirit of Blog Action Day's environmental focus, that the concept of kids supplying toys' power is nothing new. That's what wind-up toys do, including this nice little diving sub. There are also interesting branches of alternatively-powered toys in both steam power (check out these wonderful putt-putt boats) and, increasingly, solar. We found a lot of solar power experimental kits in our ZRecs research, but very few toys that were actually designed to operate out of the box and simply have power supplied by solar means. We got a solar-powered helicopter from the great people at StuffJunction, and identified one possible reason for this: The light level required to power the tiny helicopter was pretty intense, and fluorescents (including the new CFLs, which we're converting most of our home lighting to) don't seem to supply the right spectrum or intensity of light. Indoors, we basically had to hold it up within a foot of our hot halogen stove hood lights to get the propeller to spin - not quite my vision of Z happily running around the house with a helicopter with blades a'spinnin'. The chopper is supposed to work well in bright sunlight, too, but we haven't have a chance to test that yet. Z and I had a good time putting the very simple kit together, though.

The real revolution occurring in kid-powered toys is the recognition by companies like See Toys and others that technology can close off opportunities for creative play precisely because it opens up new avenues for structured play. As the pendulum swings back and forth between the value of creative, open-ended play experiences and those guided and organized, first by teachers, parents, and urban planners, and now by microprocessors and circuit boards, See Toys leapfrogs happily over the debate between which type is "educational" in favor of bringing technology - specifically, technology that doesn't carry the cost of spent batteries and power drawn from the electrical grid - into toys that are open-ended enough to invite children to assist with their imagination.