Almost everyone selling toys these days tries to tell us that their toys are educational.  But these action block sets are the real thing.  Children, playing and experimenting freely, inventing their own rules and structure as they go along or using no rules at all, will acquire and maintain new motor, cognitive, and creative skills when they engage in genuine play with almost any toy offered on Turnertoys.com, and especially with the ones shown on this page.
    An explicitly didactic toy is boring.  A toy with a predetermined set of goals, with a "right answer", is not a toy at all.  Play with such a "toy" is not play, but work. An automated toy holds attention for a while, but pretty soon, after it has done its thing, a child gets bored with it and moves on.  It is the toy that  requires thought and effort from a child, and rewards new efforts with new effects, that really teaches. There is a place for real, structured learning even in the life of an infant.  But such behavior is never play and shouldn't be confused with play.  
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