Dr. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith led the TIMPANI toy studies, a multi-year observational programme that watched real children play with real toys in real classrooms, and the plainest toys kept winning.
Dr. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith is a Professor of Early Childhood Education at Eastern Connecticut State University, and the lead researcher behind one of the most unusual research programmes in his field: the TIMPANI toy studies, which stands for Toys that Inspire Mindful Play and Nurture Imagination. Run through the university's Center for Early Childhood Education, TIMPANI did something almost nobody else in the toy world does. It tested toys.
Not tested in the marketing sense, where a focus group says which box looks most exciting. Tested in the scientific sense. Year after year, Trawick-Smith and his colleagues placed toys in preschool classrooms and observed, systematically, what happened next: how the children played, for how long, with how much thought, language and imagination. Every toy received a score based not on what its packaging promised, but on the quality of the play it actually produced in the hands of real three- and four-year-olds.
That is why he is worth listening to. Most claims about toys, including the ones on this site, are arguments. TIMPANI is observation. When a researcher spends years watching children play and writing down what he sees, his conclusions deserve a different kind of attention.
The headline finding of the TIMPANI programme is easy to state and hard to dismiss: simple, open-ended toys consistently produce the most complex, sustained and creative play in preschool classrooms. Basic construction toys and pretend-play toys, the kind with no batteries, no script and no single correct use, sat at the top of the scoring year after year. The toys did less, so the children did more: building, negotiating, narrating, problem-solving, returning to the same toy day after day with new ideas.
The mirror image of that finding is just as important. Many heavily marketed toys scored poorly. The toys with the biggest advertising budgets, the strongest shelf presence and the loudest boxes were frequently the ones that produced the thinnest play: short engagement, little conversation, limited imagination. A toy that performs leaves the child to watch, and watching scores badly when what you are measuring is thinking.
It is worth pausing on what makes this credible. TIMPANI did not ask children which toys they liked, or parents which toys looked educational. It watched the play itself and scored its quality: persistence, creativity, cooperation, language. By that measure, the gap between what toy marketing celebrates and what children's minds actually feed on was wide, and it pointed the same way every time. The full programme is documented by the Center for Early Childhood Education at Eastern Connecticut State University.
The source
TIMPANI Toy Studies, Center for Early Childhood Education, Eastern Connecticut State University · Read the original
For a parent of a young child, TIMPANI offers something rare: a shopping principle backed by classroom observation rather than instinct. When you stand in a toy shop, or scroll a gift guide, the question is not "which toy looks the most impressive?" but "which toy will leave the most work for my child to do?" The TIMPANI pattern says the second question predicts good play and the first one often predicts the opposite.
In practice, that means weighting your choices towards construction toys and pretend-play props: blocks, figures, vehicles, things that stack and balance and become other things. It means treating a heavy marketing push as neutral information at best. A toy is not bad because it is advertised, but advertising tells you about the seller's budget, not the toy's value, and TIMPANI found the two were frequently unrelated.
Two honest caveats. First, TIMPANI observed preschool classrooms, so its findings speak most directly to three- and four-year-olds in group settings; your living room is a different place, even if the same principles very likely travel. Second, this is observational research about patterns, not a verdict on any single toy in your home. A well-loved performing toy will not harm your child. The point is about the balance of the toy box, not the guilt of one purchase.
Picture the toy that wins a TIMPANI year. It is almost never the one that would win the toy fair. It is a basket of blocks on a classroom floor, and a four-year-old kneeling over them with her tongue between her teeth, because the tower is at the wobbling height and the next block will either crown it or bring it down. Nothing about the blocks tells her what to build. The bridge, the castle, the dog hospital: all of it came out of her, and that is precisely what the researchers were scoring.
Classic wooden toys map onto the TIMPANI winners' qualities almost exactly, and not by coincidence. Simple, open-ended, problem-posing: that describes the top of the scoring sheet, and it also describes the toys families were buying two centuries ago. The weight of a beech block in a toddler's hand, the click of dominoes being lined up on a kitchen table, the soft thud of a bean bag landing a foot short of the target. These toys set a problem and then go quiet, which is exactly the silence a child's imagination needs. A well-made wooden toy → does ten per cent of the work and leaves ninety to the child, and TIMPANI is the closest thing we have to proof that this ratio is where good play lives.
Jaques London has been making toys on that principle since 1795, longer than any other games company in the world, and long before anyone could measure why it worked. The firm that invented croquet in 1851 and created the Staunton chess set in 1849 built its name on toys that pose problems rather than perform: stack this, balance that, get the ring over the peg, work out the next move. Simple educational toys → of this kind do not date, because the engine of the play is the child, and children have not changed. What TIMPANI did was put numbers to an old instinct: the plainer the toy, the more room the child's mind has to fill.
The best starting point is the source itself: the Center for Early Childhood Education at Eastern Connecticut State University, home of the TIMPANI toy studies. On this site, What Are Open-Ended Toys? unpacks the toy qualities TIMPANI kept rewarding, our guide to pretend play covers the other half of the winners' list, and The Science sets this research alongside the wider evidence on play and early development.
TIMPANI stands for Toys that Inspire Mindful Play and Nurture Imagination. It is a multi-year observational research programme led by Dr. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith at Eastern Connecticut State University's Center for Early Childhood Education, in which researchers place toys in preschool classrooms and score each one by the quality of play it produces: how sustained, complex, creative and social the children's play becomes.
Basic construction toys and pretend-play toys came out on top: simple, open-ended things that can be used many ways and leave the ideas to the child. The consistent pattern across years was that the less a toy did by itself, the more the children did with it, and the higher the quality of the resulting play.
Not according to the TIMPANI pattern. Many heavily marketed toys scored poorly when researchers measured the play they actually produced. Price and advertising tell you what the seller invested, not what your child will get out of it. The more useful question is how much of the play the toy leaves for the child to invent.
The studies were run in preschool classrooms, so that is where the evidence is strongest. But the mechanism, that open-ended toys demand more thinking, language and imagination from the child, is not specific to a classroom. Most parents find the same pattern at home: the plain toys are the ones still being played with months later, while the performing toys go quiet once the novelty does.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.