More Than Play: What Toybuilding Teaches Students | Rick Hartman

In many classrooms, toys are something we put away when it’s time to get serious. But what if toys are actually one of the most effective ways to teach?

In this episode of The Brighter Side of Education, Dr. Lisa Hassler explores toybuilding as a powerful instructional approach with educational toymaker Rick Hartman, founder of School of Toy. With over 25 years of experience and more than one million students reached, Rick shares how building simple toys transforms learning from passive to active.

Rather than treating toys as extras, this conversation reframes them as tools for thinking—helping students test ideas, solve problems, and make sense of concepts in science, math, and engineering.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• How toybuilding turns abstract concepts into hands-on learning
• Why simple materials can lead to complex thinking
• How to use toybuilding as part of real instruction—not just enrichment
• What students gain when they build, test, and revise their ideas
• A simple toybuilding activity using a straw and rubber band

Whether used as a lesson starter, learning activity, or culminating experience, toybuilding offers a practical way to engage students and deepen understanding.

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Sponsored by Dr. Gregg Hassler Jr., DMD
Trusted dental care for healthy smiles and stronger communities—building brighter futures daily.

Transcript

Toys As Serious Learning Tools

Dr. Lisa Hassler 0:19

In many classrooms, toys are something we put away when it's time to get serious. But what if that assumption is backwards? What if the very things we call toys are some of the most serious learning tools students can use? Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation, and resources. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables? And how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? Over the past several decades, learning science has consistently shown that students learn more deeply when they actively construct knowledge rather than passively receive it. This idea isn't new. Educational thinkers like Piaget and Dewey emphasize that learning happens best when students interact with materials, test ideas, and reflect on real experiences, not when they simply memorize information. More recently, David Kolb's work on experiential learning reinforces this idea. When students build, experiment, and revise their thinking, they move through a powerful cycle that strengthens understanding and retention. Cognitive science helps explain why this matters. When students build something with their hands, they engage multiple systems at once. They're applying math and science concepts, strengthening spatial reasoning, and developing executive functioning skills like planning, focus, and self-regulation. Just as importantly, they're learning how to respond when something doesn't work the first time. Research on experiential and maker-center learning shows benefits that extend beyond academic content. Students demonstrate increased curiosity, stronger confidence, and improved problem solving skills. These experiences help normalize productive struggle and reposition mistakes as part of the learning process, not something to avoid. From this perspective, toys, especially those students build themselves, take on a very different role. They're no longer distractions or rewards. They become thinking tools. They make abstract ideas visible, testable, and meaningful. And that brings us to today's guest, Rick Hartman, whose work has spent decades demonstrating how toy building supports deep learning, perseverance, and joy in classrooms and homes alike. Rick is a former classroom teacher turned educational toymaker and the founder of School of Toy. Over the past 25 years, his hands-on toy building workshops and learning kits have reached more than 1 million students across thousands of schools nationwide. Rick's work blends STEAM learning, storytelling, and imagination, helping students connect academic concepts to real-world problem solving through building and play. His approach has been featured nationally, including at the Smithsonian Institution, is widely used by educators looking to make learning more engaging and meaningful. Well, good afternoon, Rick, and welcome to the brighter side of education.

From Teacher To Toy Inventor

Rick Hartman 3:28

Thank you so much, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 3:30

So you were a classroom teacher. What drew you to toy building and led you to create School of Toy?

Rick Hartman 3:38

Well, I I actually put myself through teachers' college by inventing a toy and making it by hand and selling it to local toy stores here in the Seattle area and later to distributors nationally. My beginnings as a toy inventor and a toy maker sort of coincided with my beginnings as a teacher. I'd be studying the curriculum during the day, I'd be learning my piaget and my Maria Mana Sori. And then at night I'd be back in the workshop furiously cutting up slabs of wood and gluing them together and tying rubber bands onto them. The toy that I invented was called professional thumb wrestling. It was a play on the old-fashioned children's game. Picture a miniature wrestling ring that sits on top of two hands with the thumb sticking through to thumb wrestle. And while I was student teaching, I was lucky enough also to be working with some of the pioneers in the educational technology space. And this was in the days when Apple computers were just being introduced to classrooms. Lego and Logo, the primitive programming languages, were just coming line. Some of my mentors were using video as a tool to support learning. So it was in this kind of environment that I became a classroom teacher, which gave me a lot of permission to experiment and to see what worked and what didn't in the classroom. And toys were a natural part of that. It wasn't until I was invited to teach an after-school program, though, about toy making that something really, really clicked and said to myself, you know, this could be a career here. And it happened when I brought just a bunch of old supplies, everyday materials, rubber bands and popsicle sticks and yardsticks, and taught a very small group of kids, about eight, how to make the simplest of toys using these very simple tools and techniques. Light bulbs were going off all over the place. It was it was really magical. And I went home and I told my wife, don't ever let me stop doing this. And that was 32 years ago at least. I haven't I haven't yet stopped doing it. I'm still developing new projects. I'm lucky enough to get to see this kind of sparkling learning environment in my day-to-day job. So that's my world for for all these decades now.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 5:46

Well, and I had one of your toys, and I had I I bought them for my boys when they were they were younger, yes. So I was all excited. I was like, oh my gosh, I I remember this toy. And the kids loved it. Yes. Was anyone else in your family a toy maker? Or was it just you and your curiosity?

Why Toys Teach Across Subjects

Rick Hartman 6:02

Well, you know, I I was the first inventor who went on to actually earn patents for my inventions and sell them and license them to companies. But I have to say that I grew up in a very creative and playful environment. My dad was a master yo-yo player and a top-ranked ping pong player in the day. And my mom was very design-oriented and super creative. We didn't have a lot of money growing up, but we were always scrounging materials and putting things together that might have otherwise been recycled or thrown away and turning them into objects of beauty. And so it was a natural evolution for me, and I do have to give my folks some credit.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 6:38

Well, you've been described as the Pied Piper of toy making, but beneath the fun is serious learning. So what is it about building toys that not only captures kids' attention, but supports academic skills like science, math, and engineering, as well as skills like perseverance, curiosity, and creative problem solving?

Rick Hartman 6:57

I think of toys as a universal language. They're understandable by people from all cultures, just about any age group. And the best toys are approachable by everyone. Take a little rubber ball, for example. You know, a baby might be able to hold it in its hand, maybe put it in his mouth. We gotta watch the small parts. And as we get older, we learn to roll it, then maybe throw it, see what happens when it hits another object. Later after that, we try to throw it into a poop or a basket. As we grow older, we learn to hit it and strike it with bats and rackets and our feet. And as you know, mastery of the sphere can actually become a lifelong pursuit. Add to that that toys are natural demonstrators of physical science. And then layer in the history of toys, which have a very rich heritage and tell us a lot about cultures and times gone by. Throw in a little bit of literature about toys, maybe a movie or two. And you've got this environment and this tool that is just very, very versatile in a learning environment. In my mind, there's probably no subject that doesn't have a toy we could build to help buttress the idea.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 8:08

I would have an African week in one of the last weeks of school, and they used cartons and they would paint them different like animal patterns and then beans, and then they would them in. Thank you.

Rick Hartman 8:20

Yes, yes, it's classic, classic game.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 8:22

Very simple. And they loved it because it was their toy, you know. So they they made it and they can go home and play it at home with their brothers and sisters. No, that was my only experience in making toys, but oh gosh, the kids just loved it and they always remembered it and they kept it for quite a long time. And so something as simple as beans in a in an egg carton could really stimulate that curiosity.

How Schools And Curriculum Shift

Rick Hartman 8:44

It's true. I I was uh at a school earlier today. I was working with 107 third graders, and the lunch employee lit up when she saw me and she said, uh, my kids are in college and they still have the toys that they built with you when you were at our school. And and what you're saying really rings true.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 9:00

Well, you visited thousands of classrooms and personally taught over a million children how to build their own toys. What changes have you noticed in schools and kids over time?

Making Hands On Work Virtual

Rick Hartman 9:10

Yeah, well, I began teaching right when there was a big backlash against superstructured curriculum, textbooks, basal readers, and that kind of regimented factory model in the classroom. Curriculum was very loosely defined at best. There was a lot of room for teachers to develop their own activities, their own curriculum. We called it emergent curriculum, which was sort of going with the kids' interests and building from there. And it was very exciting and super creative and taught me a lot about what works and what doesn't work. It's obviously hard to sustain that kind of a model. It's like uh laying train tracks just before the train arrives at the station and you're constantly trying to stay ahead of it. And since then, in my mind, it seems that curriculum has actually gotten better. It's structured, but the best curriculum isn't strictly regimented as it was. There's more accounting for a diversity of learning styles, skill levels, and the rubrics have also become more sophisticated. I'm a really big fan of the next generation science standards, which have really laid out the richness of what science and engineering can be. So I'm encouraged by that. One thing that hasn't changed, Lisa, is that there's still too much for teachers to do, and some things never change.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 10:25

During the pandemic, you had to go from a hands-on to a virtual space and had to be very adaptable when it came to toy building. How are your virtual lessons isolated to hands-on, um, even though you're not in the classroom?

Rick Hartman 10:37

Yeah. It was a matter of trying to physically get materials into kids' hands when they were at home during lockdown or back at the classroom during social distancing and still deliver the magic. Building a toy is a lot like building a system for building toys in homes and in classrooms. And so I ended up settling on three guiding principles for my on-demand workshops. They're the same principles I use in classrooms every day. The first one is to have compelling content, aligned with curriculum, aligned with national standards that teachers want to teach their kids and that kids are ready to learn about. The second is compelling instruction, delivered in a way that kids can relate to. So in the video portions, I've I've really tried to make them fun and lively and entertaining. And then the third piece that is crucial is managing the whole system. And just like any teacher has to master the management of kids and bodies and materials in a classroom, I've discovered ways to master the management of dozens and dozens of little toy parts in a way that doesn't drive kids, parents, and teachers crazy. So, for example, we'll give each kid a packet, but instead of a packet full of zillions of little parts that can get lost and misplaced, inside the packet there'll be three smaller packets. And so the instruction is stepped. There's a chunk of instruction, a chunk of uh learning and associated content. And then students are instructed, open up package number one. Don't open up two and three yet, but take it step by step. And through thousands of in-person visits, I have learned what groupings of content and activities are appropriate for a given time frame. And so in this way, kids are working consecutively through the three packets in the workshop in order to construct their toys. And uh, one last little add-on piece is that the best projects are a little open-ended. Everybody's toy kind of starts out the same way, but really you want to end up with a kid feeling like they have ownership and that they've really created, invented, developed, designed, engineered something that was wholly unique to themselves. And so in the on-demand programs, I have five of them released right now, and more are on the way. The activities end with an invitation to try something different or add something. How can you improve it? Or what problems can you solve that exist in the toy that you might be able to solve either in the classroom or later at home when you take them back and show them off to your families?

Dr. Lisa Hassler 13:08

I very much appreciate that you've come up with all these management techniques.

Rick Hartman 13:13

I learned a long time ago that if I can make teachers' jobs easier, then everybody's happy.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 13:19

When I think about bottling up the wonder and sending it to classrooms across the country and ensuring that the magic still shows up when you can't be there in person.

Rick Hartman 13:29

I've actually discovered that there are some advantages of virtual and on-demand programming that are actually an advantage by comparison to an in-person experience. So, for example, the fact that a teacher can schedule it on their own time, as opposed to having to have this activity on a certain day at a certain time when somebody's coming to their school. Also, there's stuff you can do with video that you just can't really do practically in a live setting. So, certain effects. I do a hide-and-go-seek sequence in my early American Toys workshop where I'm talking about the games that kids played with back in the 1860s or even earlier than that. And it's surprising to me and to kids that some of the same games we play today were played by kids in early America and spinning tops and jump ropes and hide and go seek. And when I snap my fingers on the video, I magically disappear, which is a hard trick to do in front of a live audience. So no, it's been actually a pleasant surprise. I went in thinking, oh, this might not be as magical as the in-person experiences, but the feedback I'm getting from teachers is that it's every bit as magical. I actually have teachers now who are in our area who prefer the on-demand pre-recorded workshops. Even though they like having me in person, they like all the advantages of being able to sort of manage it on their own timetable.

Using Toy Building For Real Instruction

Dr. Lisa Hassler 14:50

Yeah, that is true. When you're thinking about, oh my gosh, I'm not at that point in the lesson where this would tie in the right way, I need another day, or you know what, hey, I'm actually a little bit ahead in this section. I'd like to do it now instead of having to drag something out and then wait for that moment. So I see the advantage of being able to dictate the time on your own schedule when it comes to the classroom. For teachers and homeschool parents listening, what does toy building look like as a part of real instruction and not just a special event?

Build The Straw Wrestler Toy

Rick Hartman 15:20

Well, it's both. Toy building is definitely a special activity, something that you can use to break up the routine, do something a little different Friday afternoon, Wednesday morning, but it also is a very serious instructional tool. And I have teachers who are using toy building as unit kickoffs. So, hey, we're about to be studying energy transformations. Here's a toy that we can build that uses motors and batteries and wires and connectors that's going to kind of get us excited about the studies. And then other teachers use it as sort of a culminating experience, as the celebration of learning, so to speak. So, oh, we've just learned about the properties of materials. So let's build some boats and look at how solids and liquids and gases interact to create a system that paddles across a small tub filled with water. So it works in lots of different ways. I would suggest that parents and teachers start with something very simple, nothing too elaborate, maybe some materials that are everyday objects, easily obtainable, free, is good, and then sort of go from there. Once you see sort of the sparks going off in kids' imaginations and the smiles on their faces and the curricular links that we can make with these projects, then I think you can't help but be hooked.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 16:36

Do you have a project that you can share with us? Maybe something simple for educators and parents to try to reinforce learning or spark some curiosity at home.

Rick Hartman 16:46

Well, yes, I would love to share one. This is a simple, simple toy. And I'm gonna try to describe what I'm doing for listeners who aren't seeing the video. This toy requires just two simple things. One is a drinking straw, and I happen to like paper drinking straws for environmental reasons, but also it's they're easier to decorate. So a regular straw, straight straw, and a tiny, tiny rubber band. This one happens to be about the size that kids use for braces. It's about, oh, maybe a half inch in diameter. So that's all you need: paper straw and one rubber band, and something to decorate with. And so what I'm doing here is I'm taking my paper straw and I'm going to cut it in half with a pair of scissors. This is a very natural opportunity to talk about estimation. And what is estimation? And when is estimation appropriate and when isn't it? If you're talking to slightly older kids, you can talk about fractions. Where's the one-half marks? And I just snipped the straw in half. And I'm going to see how close I was, but I'm not exactly perfectly equal here. I'm off by a couple of millimeters, but but Lisa, does is that okay when you're estimating to be off by a couple millimeters? I think it is, yes. I think it is too. So we're going to call these two half straws our wrestlers. And not a thumb wrestling toy, but with keeping with the theme of wrestling, I'm going to take a colored marker and I'm going to put a marking on one of those half straws right now. So I think I'm just going to draw a little tip on the end of one of the straws. This is an orange marker, and it looks a little bit like a magic wand in a way. There's a little tip on the end of it. Of course, if it's a kid, sometimes they like to get very elaborate with their coloring and their decorating. Sometimes we've had kids put faces on their little straws. And since they're wrestlers, I've even had kids draw little leotards on their wrestlers to give them some personality. So I've got my two half straws. One of them has a little bit of color on it to differentiate it from the other one. And now all I'm going to do is take this little number eight rubber band and slide it over both straws at the same time. So it almost looks like the two half straws are connected with a little belt together like that. And what I'll start doing now is holding one of the wrestlers, the half straws, and start twisting the second wrestler around and around in order to twist the rubber band. And it's a little bit like winding up a propeller on a model airplane. You're holding one of the straws and then you're twisting the other one. And this incidentally is a great opportunity to talk about stored energy and motion energy, because if you look carefully at the rubber band, you'll see all those little bumps and twists in the rubber band. That's a great entry point to figuring out where does the energy come from? Well, it came from my body, and where did my body get energy? So you can go on and on, even with just a tiny toy like this. But but the way that this toy is played with is that I'm gonna throw them on the table. They're all wound up. There's a lot of stored up, we call it potential energy in that rubber band. And then I'm gonna drop it on the table and they're gonna unwind and untwist and kind of wrestle. And the winner is whichever straw lands on top of its opponent. So if the orange straw is leaning on top of the white straw, orange wins. If the white straw is leaning on top of the orange straw, then white wins. And and uh Lisa, guess what it is if they end up side by side? It is a tie. That's right. It's a tie or a rematch. So who are you who are you rooting for? I'm curious. Are you rooting for the orange or the white straw?

Dr. Lisa Hassler 20:22

Yeah, I want the orange guy.

Rick Hartman 20:24

Okay, let's see who goes. Ready, set, wrestle. They're wrestling, they're rolling, they're uh-oh, it was a tie. It's a tie. Very interesting. Side by side. But I do have to say that they seem to want to rematch. It's a very simple toy. It's an invitation for all kinds of science-y and mathy things. What about predictability? What about trying to graph how many times the orange straw wins compared to the white straw? What about probability? Let's let's do a 10 or 15 or 20 tests and find out um statistically which straw is the strongest. And of course, there's a nice interpersonal component because let's say you have a straw that repeatedly wins, then of course you're going to want to uh challenge somebody else's best straw to see if if if it can be your championship straw. So there's there's a lot of possibility, even with a very, very simple two-piece toy that uh will get kids engaged, get kids laughing, smiling, and thinking about the stuff that we're trying to get them to learn about. Hopefully, our audience can find a straw, find a little baby rubber band. Um, definitely test it before you you introduce the project with your kids. You want to make sure that all the components fit right. There's one to share with your students.

Where To Find School Of Toy

Dr. Lisa Hassler 21:38

This is great restaurant waiting fun too. So possibilities are always endless. I love that. Well, Rick, thank you so much for sharing your work and this wonderfully imaginative perspective that you have on toy building. Uh, you've helped reframe what toys can be and what learning can look like when we honor curiosity, creativity, and perseverance. But before we wrap up, can you tell teachers and parents how to connect with you? Um, where can they find more out about School of Toy?

Rick Hartman 22:07

Oh, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Lisa. This has really been a pleasure and an honor. Probably the best way for folks to get a hold of me is through my website, schooloftoy.com, all one word. And I'm also on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn, so feel free to message me through those platforms as well.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 22:26

I encourage you to look at the toys in your classroom or home a little differently. Instead of asking, when do we have time for this? Try asking what kind of thinking does this invite? Whether it's a simple build, a hands-on challenge, or a student design toy, consider how making and tinkering might support curiosity, problem solving, and perseverance in your learning space. Sometimes the most serious learning starts with the things we're used to setting aside. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at Lisa at drlisaarhassler.com or visit my website at www.drlisaarhassler.com and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.