God i love Toys.
While perusing through the giant fair ( spanning almost 3 levels in size) the following products in particular really caught my attention.
Firstly, I-gami. by play smart.
Construction kits and toys were huge at the toy fair. No surprise, seeing as toys such as lego and kinex have moulded many a child's initial concepts about engineering and creative building. Including my own, growing up and still today. However the one thing i always found lacking was in many ways any particular reference to global culture. Although Lego in the past had exhibited kits that depicted some life in exotic countries and time periods e.g. India, Feudal Japan, Medieval Europe etc. there was no intrinsic reference to something core to a culture. I- gam,i thereby succeeds by using the traditional art of Japanese Origami as a platform for construction building. ALthough the similarities with other construction toys was prevalent the I gami stood out when i tried it out for myself. Never before this did i truly value the shape of a triangle. Finally, the price. There is a credit crunch happening, i wouldn't want to necessarily buy my kids a Lego kit retailing for 20$ when i could get him a MEdium to large scaled I gami set for 5.99$.
Then came the Tickle plant. As ridiculous as it seemed, The tickle plant intrigued me to say the least.
Roaming around the Toy fair it clearly evident that sustainability and new age attitudes towards the environment had shown its affects of the selection of Toys coming out. Boards games about recycling and wooden toys littered a lot of the isles, yet here was the one stop that actually marketed a plant as a toy. The tickle plant was a unique breed of plant that when touched would curl its leaves up as if it were well, " tickled". Although the novelty soon wore of for me, surrounding Parents and others at the Toy fair were eating it up, Strangly empathizing with a plant in way that i had never seen before. They were quite literally shying away from tickling it again and apologizing to it!!!. 
Lastly, Swinxs. Swinxs is a portable, sustainable gaming platform that encourages kids as well as adults to play classic analog games, such as Hide and seek , relay races and quizes while also providing kids with the ability to download games online, such as card games and memory games. The console excitied me purely for how unconventional it was. When was the last time you used a gaming console as an intermediate during a hide and seek game?. Moreover, what excited me most was how much it encourages brain stim
ulation be it by forcing us to use all of our senses independantly or by having us solve math problems. Toys that make you smarter- wish my mom got me this way back when.
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