Ron Worley's nearly fully funded in his Kickstarter for Facets — wooden, geometrical blocks with small magnets that easily lock/unlock and build amazing, gemlike geometrical forms.
$25 gets you a set of 24 Facets — there's not much a quantity break for larger orders. Worley is retired and runs his own toy company in Vegas, but doesn't say if he's ever shipped a product before, so, as always with crowdfunding, caveat emptor.
The initial introduction to FACETS is pretty consistent for both young and old. There is a short period of critical evaluation: "these things look really interesting, but what do they do?" Then the pieces begin to snap together, this way and that, and hey!, you've got yourself a ring. And then another ring connected to the first, but turned in the other direction like the links in a chain. Then the structures begin to grow and spread out, and fall over. After a while the rings and loops are connected together in larger and larger structures that interlink and hold together. And, not surprisingly, the more balanced and symmetrical the constellation of FACETS the more stable and the larger it is able to grow.FACETS are truly captivating. They grab your attention. FACETS are a highly flexible and yet very simple reward based hand-eye manipulation of pieces that teaches stability, symmetry and balance. Excellent for the development of manual dexterity! The reward is immediate: the pieces snap together in rings and links and chains! And the rewards are progressive as the structures and connections of structures grow larger and larger. Careful! Playing with FACETS can be addictive! By analogy, playing with FACETS is like playing that video game where the game pieces spin and flip and fit together, except that instead of playing a game on a screen, you are using your hands to build 3D structures with geometrically shaped blocks that snap together magnetically. The geometry of FACETS is the reason they work, but not what they do.
A big part of the attraction of FACETS is the magnetic action. The magnets cause the FACETS to snap together and stick, but the connections are easily broken and the pieces can be flipped over and snapped together in the opposite orientation. The variety of different structures that can be created is endless.
FACETS: The Building Blocks of 3D Geometry
(Thanks, Alice!)
