The playroom lookslike a child’s vision of the North Pole. Four children ricochet around it, filling the air with squeals of excitement and squawks of electronic molded plastic.
Their attention span is about two minutes for a good toy, 10 seconds for a dull one. And Marianne Szymanski, watching with the eyes of a point guard, makes mental notes about which toys are passing the test.
Szymanski says Toy Tips Inc., a research group she founded in 1991, is the nation’s only organization besides Consumer Reports that does independent evaluations – ones not funded by toy companies. She works in a shocking-pink office in the basement of her Franklin house – right next to the playroom.
Toys are tested at hundreds of schools and day care centers across the country, and all the evaluations come back to Szymanski. Adults evaluate how the products help a child’s movement, thinking, personality and social interaction.
The results are published in Toy Tips & Parenting Hints magazine, where a single-paragraph review may be the distillation of 100 hours of testing. The standard report card has four grades for a toy’s educational value, one grade for the kids’ fun quotient and a cumulative score.
Only toys with passing grades are published. Szymanski prefers recognizing good stuff to denouncing bad. In addition to her magazine and Web site, she keeps busy with speeches, TV appearances and, most recently, a line of Toy Tips clothing.
However, Szymanski still conducts some research sessions in her basement, and her own children, ages 6 and 3, may serve as research helpers. On this day, the four kids in the playroom are bored by Crazy Creatures, a game of assembling farm animals, but enjoy Honeybee Hop. It’s a three-foot plastic rod with a bee on the end that spins in a circle, and players jump over it as it comes around. A sure bet for future fame in Toy Tips magazine or at toytips.com.
