Smart Toy - Selection Criteria

Selection Criteria

The issue of balance is often mentioned in connection with smart toys—namely, that their use should be kept in proportion with other play activities. They should also be age appropriate and not become a substitute for interaction with parents. Playing with smart toys should be a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional play activities.

Stevanne Auerbach emphasizes smart toys which have strong play value for the child, and are the "right toy at the right time." She does not favor those toys which fail to encourage discovery and exploration. Auerbach quips that "a toy playing with a child, as opposed to a child playing with a toy, is not beneficial for the child.

Those toys that give the child control over interaction are best according to some child development researchers. Kiely Gouley argues that "...some of these toys are very entertaining and they make the child a passive observer." She continues: "...you want the child to engage with the world. If the toy does everything, if it sings and beeps and shows pictures, what does the child have to do?"

Smart toys should have very clean, easy-to-understand and navigate user interfaces. Claire Lerner, a child development specialist, says that pretend play can be inhibited by highly structured toys: "They superimpose someone else's story on the kids. So kids don't develop their imaginations." In her view, simpler toys are preferable, because they are more flexible.

From a designer of smart toy's viewpoint this means that in order to achieve simplicity technologies need to be combined so as to render a very naturalistic user interface within the limits of other design constraints.

Children by nature are unpredictable and often fail to follow the same rules followed by adults. One of the tasks of the designer is to anticipate ways that interaction with children can fail to be as expected, and to guide the user into one of the expected responses. This can be achieved by giving the child options to select and other types of cues to follow.

For parents and child development specialists alike, the task remains to select the right toys at the right time. However, from the toy designer's standpoint the challenge is to identify the best technologies at feasible cost, and then to develop products around those capabilities and limitations of the technologies used in smart toys.

Anthropologist David Lancy argues that parent-child play is largely an artifact of wealthy developed countries not practiced by most of the world's population. It results from competitive pressures to ready children for survival in an information-based economy. He views the promotion of interaction between parents and children in "play activities" as a form of cultural imperialism practiced by the upper and upper middle class upon lower income socioeconomic strata. This is possibly one reservation on a completely unrestricted view that parents should always be involved in selecting appropriate smart toys for their children.