Toy Workshop · 18 finalists · September 2026
I have a 3D printer, a drawer full of cheap electronics and two kids (9 and 6). So I asked a team of Claude agents to invent toys that combine 3D printing, electronics and AI. It took two rounds. Round one: research, then two independent idea generators. Round two: fresh generators with deliberately different inputs, cross-breeding of the best ideas and a blind AI jury that scored each toy without knowing who proposed it. Out of 53 toy ideas, these 18 are the ones I shortlisted.
They’re ideas, not products. Nothing here is for sale and nothing is finished yet; nine of them have a one-pager with an interactive demo, a parts list and the architecture. Every toy is made of building blocks, small reusable ideas such as an NFC tag sealed inside a print or the Gateway, a small server on a Mac that keeps the AI keys out of the toy. The dark chips are the blocks I picked for each toy. Hover over or tap any chip to see what it means.
The two toys I want most.
A family radio whose dial is marked with your own people: Grandpa’s 1956, Grandma’s 1971 and our son’s 2046.
5 of 9 building blocks picked
Spinning tops from Printables launch with a geared ripcord, and a printed creature rides on top from the very first spin. The creature that stays on longest wins.
3 of 9 building blocks picked
Sixteen maybes worth keeping, in order of how many of their building blocks I picked. On a tie, toys with a one-pager go first.
A stone in your hand gets warm as you head toward the treasure and cold when you go the wrong way.
7 of 10 building blocks picked
Invent a spell, print it as a rune and give it to your sister. It will work for her too.
7 of 10 building blocks picked
Five masks, five guardians and two ways to the treasure: talk him into it, or sneak up while he sleeps.
7 of 10 building blocks picked
Passenger figures board at the station, and the conductor announces the stops, the jokes and the adventures of every passenger.
6 of 10 building blocks picked
Tap your key fob and the machine prints your very own newspaper with the weather, the day’s plan and a riddle.
Each child has a key fob with a chip and gets their own slip every morning: the weather from the garden, what’s on today, a fun fact and a riddle at their level. The content is made overnight and code checks the math riddles, so in the morning the machine only prints. The answer comes tomorrow, because this is a ritual, not a test. The toy has no microphone and no speaker.
5 of 7 building blocks picked
Put figures on the stand, press the button and the narrator spins a fairy tale starring exactly them.
The child sets figures with chips into the stand’s slots, and the narrator builds a fairy tale around them, with choices made by a colored button or a token. The figures remember facts from earlier stories, so their life stories grow over weeks. The toy has no microphone and plays pre-generated stories when it’s offline. Figure memory and a life that spans several toys later went into the Hatchery.
5 of 8 building blocks picked
Crank a fairy tale: fast for cheerful, slow for spooky, and backward to rewind the story and send it another way.
4 of 9 building blocks picked
A big glowing d20 that knows what it rolled, and a narrator who retells every roll with full drama.
A translucent printed die with an accelerometer knows which face is up and lights up to match the result. The narrator retells the roll to fit the scene the game master set up. The die charges wirelessly and can work as an input for other board games in the house. The agent who came up with it rated it the weakest of its ideas for novelty.
4 of 4 building blocks picked
A bird feeder that listens to the birds, watches them, and prints a garden tabloid every morning.
The feeder records sound and snaps a photo whenever a bird lands on the perch, which has a scale built in. Local birdsong recognition and the weight identify the species, a vision model describes what they’re up to, and in the morning Claude writes a funny newspaper using only these facts. A thermal printer prints it at breakfast, photo of the day included. The camera physically can’t see the neighbors.
4 of 7 building blocks picked
Ask where penguins live, and the globe spins by itself and points at Antarctica.
The globe answers with movement: it spins, the pointer slides to the right spot, and only then does it start talking. Code checks the model’s coordinates against a database of places and corrects them. In quiz mode it points at a random place and the family guesses. The printed globe has raised continents you can feel.
4 of 6 building blocks picked
An owl and a fox argue over the answer. One is right, the other is convincingly wrong, and the kids decide whom to trust.
Code picks a question from a database of common misconceptions and decides which character is right. Both characters argue in their own voices, and the kids put a token in front of the one they believe. The reveal comes with an explanation of why the wrong answer sounded so convincing, and a scoreboard shows how the kids are doing. The idea lives on as the ages 10–14 variant of another toy in the set, Lie or Truth?
4 of 5 building blocks picked
Say what should happen next and the machine prints the next comic panel, ready to color in.
The child dictates the plot, and within seconds the machine prints a panel with outlined characters and a speech bubble. The Gateway on the Mac keeps track of the story, so the characters stay the same and the plot carries on. Pictures come only from a library the parent has approved, and the child never generates an image. Kids color the panels and stick them on the wall as an endless roll.
3 of 5 building blocks picked
A tape-recorder box in the kitchen where anyone can say one sentence about their day. It becomes a weekly chronicle and, at the end of the year, a medal.
A family member taps their token and records one sentence, nothing more. Transcription runs locally, and once a week Claude puts together a printed chronicle with a quote of the week. At the end of the year, code fills a medal template with the quote of the year and prints it. It’s a family diary with no writing, and it gets more valuable every year.
3 of 6 building blocks picked
A fairy tale you mix with faders while it plays: push up the spookiness and the next paragraph gets darker.
Four faders (spookiness, silliness, rhyme and length) change the next paragraph of the story while it’s being told. Code, not the prompt, enforces an age-based cap on spookiness. Siblings can each get their own fader. The idea of a physical control steering a story’s mood went into the Fairy-Tale Barrel Organ.
3 of 5 building blocks picked
Two sliding riverbanks, a box of connectors and skewers, and a ramp that launches the marble at the same speed every time. Will it make it across?
2 of 10 building blocks picked
Your šprtec table hockey set learns to spot a goal: the board lights up in the team’s color, the siren wails and the score ticks up.
1 of 7 building blocks picked