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More Than a Princess: Female Engineer Spends Life Savings to Design Construction Toy for Girls

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More Than a Princess: Female Engineer Spends Life Savings to Design Construction Toy for Girls

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Published on July 9, 2013

Women have been rallying for some time to overhaul the girl’s aisles in toy stores, tired of seeing everything packaged in pink, made for princesses, and only concerned with beauty or caretaking. But with tried-and-true brands like LEGO going out of their way to further remove girls from their central marketing, what can we expect besides more of the same?

Engineer Debra Sterling has figured it out. Because she knows little girls are more than princesses, and they deserve toys that engage their brains. With a brand new commercial to rally the troops, Goldie Blox is set to hit shelves.

First off, enjoy this incredibly badass commercial set to Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” featuring little girls constructing toys that better suit their needs and styles. They are fierce and unstoppable, and outraged that those rows upon rows of fuschia are letting them down.

If you head over to Sterling’s Kickstarter page where she originally funded the product (and got nearly twice the $150,000 she was asking for), she makes it clear that enjoying pink and princesses is not the problem. What is the problem are toys that refuse to engage girls in a constructive capacity. By conducting research on over 100 little kids, she decided to create a toy that ignited girls’ interest in engineering via storytelling (an area that girls are commonly attracted to from a very early age). Goldie Blox was born.

Through the story of Goldie—a kid inventor—and her plans for her dog Nacho, kids can follow along on the journey and construct items that Goldie requires to complete the tale. The hope is that by building girls’ confidence in areas of construction and spatial awareness, they will be more likely to pursue science and mathematics in school and beyond. Sterling herself notes that it never even occurred to her to think of engineering as a career until her final year of high school. What she wants is for young women to know that this is an option for them even in their formative years.

Goldie Blox

As she says, princesses and tiara-wearing can be fun for sure—but little girls are so much more than that. And they deserve toys that will prove it to them.

Goldie Blox’s first adventure is available at Toys’R’Us right now, with more stories on the way by the end of the summer. Support the future engineer in your family by giving her a head start!


Emmet Asher-Perrin would play with Goldie Blox now, they look so cool. She has written essays for the newly released Doctor Who and Race and Queers Dig Time Lords. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

About the Author

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Emmet Asher-Perrin

Author

Emmet Asher-Perrin is the News & Entertainment Editor of Reactor. Their words can also be perused in tomes like Queers Dig Time Lords, Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. They cannot ride a bike or bend their wrists. You can find them on Bluesky and other social media platforms where they are mostly quiet because they'd rather to you talk face-to-face.
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