Three female engineers build toys to inspire young girls to love science

Alice and her cofounders say they were exposed to technology and engineering at a young age. Rather than playing with princesses or dolls, Bettina build hundreds of lego creations with her older brother, and Jennifer recalls solving math riddles in her head with her dad. ”We believe there is a connection,” they wrote on their Kickstarter page.

When Alice Brooks was a little girl, she asked her father for a Barbie doll. He gave her a saw, which she used to hack a dollhouse.

Alice, now 24, excelled at school and went on to study mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This summer, while enrolled in graduate school at Stanford University, a project has been brewing: can a toy inspire the next generation of young girls to love science, technology, engineering and math?

The founders believe the problem is rooted in childhood. “When we looked around at girls’ toys today, we did not see the kinds of toys that inspired us when we were young,” the girls explained in a blog post for Women 2.0, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of female entrepreneurs. “We build toys to inspire the next generation of female technology innovators.”