Mag Board
What: A hand built toy made of wood, acrylic, magnets, and marbles for the Children & Architecture course at the University of Chicago
When: 2022
Skills: Research, Ideation, Design, Development
The block toy kit includes an easel, 12 blocks, and 2 marbles.
Introduction
I built this toy for a college class in 2022. I was itching to take a class where I could make things with my hands and flex some creative muscles, and I sure got it. This project woke me up from a haze of statistics and environmental research and made me confront my desire to seriously pursue design (although in 2025 I am still figuring out what that will look like).
It all started with lots of reading and discussion about children, their place in the world, and the objects and spaces that are built for them. We studied the origins of toys, kindergarten, and took field trips to playgrounds and schools.
Studying classroom toys on a school visit.
So what are we making?
Our prompt was to design and build some type of wooden block or creative building toy (very loosely defined however we liked) for children. As we moved through the course material, met with experts (a teacher, a child psychologist studying how young children play, a playground designer, a carpenter), and heard feedback from real kids (our cousins, our neighbor’s kids, our classmates cousins and neighbor’s kids) my design evolved over and over again.
First came sketching…
and planning…
and lots more sketching and planning.
There’s sawdust all over me
Construction in the wood shop was surprisingly time intensive. I learned dozens of new skills and had lots of fun with the pressurized nail gun! Sanding every block took hours - first in the shop on a spindle sander, then at home with sand paper. Not only did sanding give the blocks a really nice soft feel, it was incredibly important the whole toy had no sharp edges a kid could injure themselves on.
A toy emerges
The Mag Board toy is a magnetic easel with magnetic blocks that can be arranged on the board to make a marble track. The easel has short legs for ideal play on the floor and easily opens and closes for storage. For the blocks I chose simple geometric shapes that leave room for interpretation, experimentation, and play with or without the easel. They can be used as “intended” to build a marble run or however the player imagines!
The Final Product (for now…)
The front of the Mag Board easel is a sheet of acrylic cut to size with a laser cutter and sanded along the edges by hand. On the back of the easel’s acrylic face are 35 magnets are glued at equal intervals. Each block has a matching magnet embedded flush on one side.
I originally wanted to use a magnetic sheet on the back of the board to allow the blocks to stick at any point of the board. However, in testing, the magnetic sheet wasn’t strong enough to hold up the blocks.
A fun and unexpected feature of the Mag Board was that the marbles I ordered turned out to be magnetic! Sometimes in the middle of a marble run on the board, they would suddenly stick to a magnet.
Mag Board in action in a kindergarten class at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
Mag Board (I made two - this one with an opaque acrylic) on display in the MADD Center at the University of Chicago.
Mag Board in play during the final class presentation of our block toy projects.
Kids do the darndest things
By far the most rewarding stage of this project was getting to bring it into a kindergarten classroom at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and have a bunch of 5 and 6-year-olds completely surprise me with how they used it. They stuck as many blocks as they could to the board, then cheerfully swept them off in a cascade of wood. They took handfuls of marbles and stacked them between blocks until the magnets gave out and everything fell to the floor in a happy crescendo. They tried over and over again to stick the blocks to the back side of the board and were puzzled when the magnets repelled. One girl crawled under the easel and lay there contentedly watching her classmates play through the acrylic.
This was a lightbulb moment for me - not only did I suddenly have 100 new ideas for the Mag Board watching these kids play with it, it sparked a love for the design process that I’ve found myself chasing ever since.
Reflections
The size, shapes, varying woods, and feel of the blocks are a hit - they are pleasing to hold, allow for stacking and building, but have enough variation to require creativity and innovation in play.
Opaque and transparent acrylic easel faces offer different play experiences. Knowing vs not-knowing what is happening behind the board adds a unique experiential element to each Mag Board.
Next time, more magnets! A (stronger) magnetic sheet in place of the individual magnets on the easel and magnets embedded in multiple sides of the blocks (maybe flipped on one side so blocks can be stuck together) would allow for more freedom of play.
Marbles are secondary. Some type of rolling element (maybe a larger wooden ball) is fun, but the magnetic features of the Mag Board were the most used and most unique compared to other classroom toys.
Building things and watching people use them is unbelievably fulfilling, and thinking about how you can improve your product is addicting like nothing else!
A proud parent with her two children. They are vastly different but she loves them both the same. Also, we were terrified the huge acrylic would scratch or crack before presentation and left the paper on as long as we could.
Presenting our final group project on the Mega Mag Board!
Epilogue
For the second half of the course we were split into small groups and our first team project was to build a giant version of one of our toys. So of course we built a Mega Mag Board easel. It was a blast to build and a pain to have. It barely fit in a mini van, and the massive sheet of acrylic made it really heavy. It did make for a really fun presentation board when we presented our final group project, but then I made the mistake of volunteering to bring it home. Folded up against the wall in my tiny college apartment, the dark blue acrylic loomed over me menacingly. I eventually gave it to my group mate, who happily housed it in her and her roommate’s much larger apartment where it was bedecked with string lights and lived happily ever after!