Educational Toys and Materials

Paper model logo.

Information concerning educational toys and materials useful for introducing the concepts of symmetry, geometric relationships and steric properties to young people has been gathered by Kate Crennell of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. The materials are suited to children of various ages and include coloring books, paper cut out models, tiling and model building kits, elementary textbooks and computer games and software.

Kate Crennell beside her poster in Beijing, August 1993.

She notes that many of the materials are available in early learning centers, hands on museums and exploratoriums and provides a list of address of toy stores in the UK that market many of the items on her list. She also listed the following educational software catalogs that might respond to orders from outside England. Acorn Education Directory, from Acorn Computers Ltd, Acorn House, Vision Park, Histon, CAMBRIDGE, CB4 4AE Tel.: (0223) 254254, fax: (0223) 254 262 AVP Computing, (for Archimedes, BBC, IBM PC, Rm nimbus) School Hill Centre, CHEPSTOW Gwent, NP6 SPH Tel.: (0291) 625439, fax: (0291) 629671 National Council for Educational Technology, Sir William Lyons Road, Science Park, COVENTRY, CV4 7EZ Tel.: (0203) 416994, fax: (0203) 411418 Rickett Educational Media, Software Directory. Ilton, ILMINSTER, Somerset, TA19 9HS Tel.: (0460) 57152, fax: (0460) 53176.

Kate has arranged small exhibits of the toys at BCA meetings. She also presented a related poster concerning microcomputer programs for teaching crystallography and materials science at the IUCr Congress in Beijing.

For further information contact: Kate Crennell, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0QX, England, Tel.: 0235 446397, FAX: 0235 445720 e-mail: KMC@isise.rl.ac.uk.