Let’s start with a fan, stackable tubes that fit together and a few balls. Then, let’s add colors, numbers from 1 to 7, and eye-catching space-themed graphics. What do we get? Hape’s Rocket Ball Air Stacker, is an exciting new toy that adds aerodynamic concepts to the classic piling game, making it even more exciting and entertaining.

From the age of six months and then more intensely up to the age of two to three, children are busy exploring the world around them using all their senses. Handling objects is a pretty rewarding activity, which helps develop a healthy spatial awareness. At first, the simple manipulation of things provides plenty of entertainment, but soon kids need more articulated stimuli. It is when the dividing, grouping, interlocking, stacking and overlapping begin.

In every child’s life, there is a stage they could happily work on sorting at the post office. The sorting and stacking phase is part of a healthy development process. Dividing things by color, shape, and size helps children organize knowledge. Besides, piling objects to make towers taller than yourself can be pretty exciting and rewarding if you often feel small compared to the world around you.

Starting from these considerations, we conceived a toy capable of combining other stimuli to the stacking activities to make the game even more fun. So we created the Rocket Ball Air Stacker, which immediately attracts children with its stackable pieces in irresistible colors. And then it keeps locked for a long time thanks to its floating ball that seems to spin in the air because of magic. But there is no magic trick here: it is all science.

Divide, stack, learn!

Stacking, what a passion! There is a stage in a child’s development when sorting, grouping, and stacking items becomes an irresistible pastime. All organizational activities help to acquire tools to understand the world: notice the similarities and differences between objects, divide them by type, color, shape, or size and then put them in orderly rows or overlap them, creating towers.

Children like to understand the relationships between things, how they interact with each other, what differences and similarities exist between two objects, and so on. At the same time, these movements stimulate the development of psychomotor and linguistic skills crucial to facing the challenges of daily life.

From the evolutionary point of view, stacking is also an incentive to stand up, gaining more and more confidence in abandoning the four-legged position in favor of the standing one. So, parents should encourage these activities by offering objects and toys to divide, organize, and stack.

Sorting and stacking: all the benefits of these activities

Around six months of age, babies are busy gaining the postural stability needed to remain in a sitting position. At the same time, they are working on the coordination of movements. Sitting and stacking objects is a great way to do both, allowing their bodies to perform critical stabilization, self-regulation, and adjustment activities.

So, while they are busy grasping and moving objects, they learn to keep their balance without even realizing it. In addition, gathering objects and organizing them by type helps children develop fine motor skills. The control and positioning of fingers to grasp and release things do need some practice, indeed. Finally, stacking activities help children develop hand-eye coordination, depth perception, and position in space.

Rocket Ball Air Stacker: take stacking to a whole new level

With their innate creativity, children do not need much to have fun. At first, giving them pieces of the same shape but differing in size or color may be enough to stimulate them. Objects every day offer a chance to work on the concepts of sequence, similarity/difference, increasing or decreasing order, size, and so on. But as they grow and develop more sophisticated skills, they will need more engaging challenges.

For this very reason, we have developed a toy that combines dividing, stacking, and building with lots of other stimuli. The Rocket Ball Air Stacker is a toy that stimulates children to stand up, handle and stack objects, distinguish colors and numbers. Consisting of an air fan base and several colored and transparent tubes, it has the shape of a space rocket. It stands out from other stacking toys for its design, aerodynamics, and the peekaboo effect of the ball.

Enjoy all the features of Rocket Ball Air Stacker

Concepts of aerodynamics, irresistible colors, numbers, and above all, a ball that seems to spin by magic, but it is all science. The Rocket Ball Air Stacker uses a physical principle to create an entertaining effect. Press the button on the base to activate the fan.

The air jet will push the ball and make it float around the top edge of the last tube. Here gravity exerts a thrust equal and opposite to that of the fan, keeping the two forces in balance. But when you put the lid over the last tube, the ball returns to the base. Captivated by the ball movement, children will try to grab it and interact in various ways. The alternation between transparent and colored tubes increases the interest, generating the same surprise as the peekaboo game.

Playing with this amazing toy stimulates balance and fine motor skills, as children have to stand upright to stack all the tubes. In addition, each piece has different numbers and colors. By spending hours around this stacker, children learn to distinguish objects by type and organize knowledge, familiarizing themselves with the decimal numbering system.

The Rocket Ball Air Stacker is a super-fun and stimulating toy that can inspire curiosity towards aerodynamics, physics, and outer space. If your child is passionate about cosmos exploration, look at other toys such as the Solar System Puzzle and the Four Stage Rocket Ship.

It is never too early to start learning with Hape!