When I was a kid, Legos were the coolest toy ever. I don’t remember anyone telling me they weren’t for girls, but even if they had, I probably wouldn’t have listened.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal featured an article by Diana Kapp, “Can New Building Toys for Girls Improve Math and Science Skills?” [Article has been subsequently locked. Check out the video tab instead.]

The article references several products on the market aimed at girls 4-10, from GoldieBlox to Lego’s own Lego Friends line. While the ultimate goal for some of these companies is to, of course, turn a profit, there is significant interest in getting little girls to love tech and learn a bit about basic engineering.

Important notes:

- while spatial differences exist between boys and girls at younger ages, these differences can be overcome by practicing and using spatial skills which are improved by building toys

- research cited in the article shows that preschoolers who can arrange blocks into sophisticated towers will grow into teenagers likely to perform better on standardized tests

- despite the large amount of pastels, the goal isn’t to just “shrink and pink” boys toys

Be sure to check out the accompanying video.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: One day after this was posted, Tim Ferriss posted an article that included a more in-depth exploration of the GoldieBlox product. See here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2013/04/24/how-to-online-business/

Watch this TED video from AnnMarie Thomas, a School of Engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas. Using two different kinds of play dough, she demonstrates basic electrical circuits in a format suitable for tiny hands to explore.

(If you can’t see the video, try clicking here.)

Want to try these out yourself? Visit the Squishy Circuits project page for more information.

Yesterday marked the first day of the 2011 World Science Festival. This week, as part of its 4th annual celebration, “the most anticipated annual science event in the world takes over New York City,” and “will celebrate women in science – both past and present – with special and unique programs and a plethora of women featured throughout the event who are pioneers in their fields.” Festival co-creator Tracy Day hopes to highlight breakthrough research that a few of the scientists in attendance are currently working on, and to honor pioneering women in science in an effort to promote science and math education to young girls.

Other festival presenters and moderators include (all quotes directly from the WSF site):

Faith Salie – a contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. “The only Rhodes scholar who performs stand-up comedy, Faith earned her sci-fi cred getting beamed up as the genetically-engineered savant Sarina Douglas on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and will forever be immortalized on a DS9 trading card.”

Heather Knight – an electrical engineer and social roboticist who runs Marilyn Monrobot in New York, co-founder of the world’s first Robot Film Festival.

Joy Hirsch – a neuroscientist whose “ground-breaking studies of language, emotion, attention, and cognition are internationally known for advances in our understanding of how separate neural systems interact during these functions.”

Priyamvada Natarajan – a cosmologist and theoretical astrophysicist professor at Yale University whose research focuses on “exotica in the Universe — dark matter, dark energy and black holes.”

Corina Tarnita – a mathematical biologist with a PhD in Mathematics from Harvard who “applies her knowledge of mathematics to study evolution and evolutionary dynamics” focusing on “understanding how population structure affects the outcome of evolutionary processes”.

Elena Aprile – an experimental astrophysicist and professor of physics at Columbia University who is “internationally recognized for her experimental work with noble liquid detectors for research in gamma-ray astrophysics and particle astrophysics.”

…and many, *many* more.

Be sure to check the WSF site for summaries, blog posts and live webcasts.

I’ll admit I’m late to the party on this one, but in case you missed it as well, here’s the latest on electronics geek Limor Fried.

Fried was recently featured in Wired magazine (April 2011, with an awesome cover photo). For geeky folks who make stuff – or aspire to make stuff – Fried is a superstar. With an engineering masters from MIT, a gadget and gizmo site that is both newbie-friendly and expert-useful, and a web series of engineering videos that is both nerdy and informative, Fried is a stellar example of doing what you love, sticking to your principles and making money doing the geeky stuff that you were going to do anyway. Mind you, all of that is in addition to driving the open hardware movement forward by leaps and bounds – even if she’s just throwing bounties to incite innovation.

Fried has been featured a few times here on dotFiveOne  and at least one other time in Wired. The cool thing about this latest article (besides the cover photo) is that its the lynchpin of the DIY issue, which includes over 21 suggested projects. This is great hacker fodder if you don’t already have a project list a mile long.

One of the best points of the interview, IMHO, is when Fried answers the oft-asked question, “what comes next?” with a well-placed, polite “we have no idea”. As was true with the personal computer revolution, we can only imagine how open hardware development will change the world.

Been a long while since I gave anything away, so I – along with my trusty d20 – have remedied that post-haste. Congratulations to Jessica S., who won the following swag in no particular order of importance:

1. A WordCamp 2010 T-Shirt
2. An Ubuntu 10.10 CD (both 32-bit and Live CD versions)
3. A Sony Digital Field Guide
4. A Star Trek Online Guest Pass
5. A WordPress Visual Quickstart Guide
6. The Special Collector’s 200th Issue of Linux Journal

Geeky stuff for a geeky reader. Way to go, Jessica, and thanks for reading dotFiveOne!