A new Kickstarter project meets children at the intersection of education and engineering, with a little whimsy thrown in.
Strawbees are colorful, key-shaped bits of recycled plastic designed to link straws together to create three-dimensional structures. Each piece has a notched flat end, which you can insert into a quarter-inch plastic straw, and a circular head, which acts as a connector and pivot point for multiple straws and pieces.
Essentially, they're a low-tech version of the TinkerToys you played with as a kid — and just like TinkerToys, they bury the educational experience of designing and prototyping complex structures beneath the facade of play.
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On the project's Kickstarter page, which launched Jan. 21, Swedish design collective Creatables shows off a number of its Strawbees creations, from simple domes and cranes to mechanized pyramids and claws.

The appeal of the toy, according to co-creator Erik Thorstensson, is its simplicity. A pledge of $25 on Kickstarter buys 100 pieces, enough to make a large dome or umbrella. A box of quarter-inch straws, which are not included, come fairly cheap at your average local supermarket — or you can punch holes in strips of old cardboard boxes for sturdier structures.
Creatables hopes to raise $20,000 in funds to mass-produce the plastic pieces and custom die-cutting machines, as well as generate public interest in the toy. The campaign ends Feb. 20, and it has already raised more than three-quarters of its goal at the time of writing.
Thorstensson and Creatables co-founders Petter Danielson and Oscar Ternbom formed the sustainable design collective in 2008, using recycled industrial materials to manufacture offbeat products such as children's mobiles, wall hooks and the Ass Saver, a bicycle mudguard designed for Sweden's wettest cities.

Multiple Strawbees can be stacked to form nodes.
Image: Creatables
The Strawbees project was inspired by a set of circular DIY clothespins that the collective produced in 2009, which it later brought to India. Thorstensson, Danielson and Ternbom noticed that Indian children were using the clothespins as construction toys — "Legos cost the same in India as in Sweden or the U.S., so it's only very privileged children who get them," Thorstensson tells Mashable — and decided to invent a simple, affordable product designed specifically for play.
Creatables has also donated several of the die-cutting machines that produce the Strawbees (and other small plastic molds) to science centers in Sweden, as well as schools in Uganda and India. Kickstarter backers can also purchase the machine with a pledge of $600 or more.
Although Creatables is gearing their Kickstarter campaign toward children, kids of all ages can use Strawbees, Thorstensson says. The founders brought their creation to MIT, where students made springy geometric shapes and pinwheel caps.

Connected to a small motor, this Strawbees structure becomes robotic.
Image: Creatables
Thorstensson says the connectors could also have practical applications, as a basic 3D modeling and prototyping tool for engineers. By inserting LEDs into the straw and putting pressure on the structure, the refracted light will reveal its weakest points.
"Looking at load and stress levels in a structure is a classic engineering problem," Thorstensson says. "You have to learn how to experiment, fail, and learn from that failure. [With Strawbees], we can do this from preschool and upwards."
The creators plan to make several of their Strawbees blueprints available online, so backers can start building colorful contraptions right away. But Thortensson and his cohorts are confident that users will do just fine without them — your imagination is the only limit.
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