Take a play break right there at your screen. Fisher-Price let us in on a few toys tested in the company's Play Laboratory. Put down Rocket the Wonder Dog and click here for our interactive gallery.

Toy tester at work

Playing for keeps

December 7, 2000
Web posted at: 5:58 p.m. EST (2258 GMT)

In this story: Babes in toyland The nature of play World lingo The business of play RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Larry Keller
CNN.com/career Senior Writer

(CNN) -- "When they like a toy, they definitely do fight over it."

Now, if you have children who constantly fight over toys, it's a tiresome nuisance, right?

Don't tell it to Kathleen Alfano. She sees these squabbles as reason to rejoice: They could signal the next big success at Fisher-Price, where Alfano heads the toy maker's Play Laboratory.

QUICK VOTE
	How would a career in toy-testing play out for you? I'd love it -- it would be like playing for a living. Maybe: I'm not sure I wouldn't feel a little stunted after a while. No thanks. When it came to the toys, it would be the kids or me. View Results

There, Alfano listens and observes as youngsters play with -- or ignore -- the latest toy temptations designed by adults.

Those are the kids old enough to stand up, of course. Alfano and her colleagues even let babies help them determine whether a toy prototype has the makings of the next Beanie Baby or Teletubby. Although out of the mouths of babes comes ... slobber.

"They do communicate through their body language very clearly," Alfano says. "We're able to read what they're telling us. The way they move their eyes, the intensity by which they get involved in something, by the way they flash their hands, the way they kick their feet, the way they drool, the way they make gurgling or babbling sounds. Even a 6-month-old can show us" if he or she is pleased with a toy, she says.

We'll take Alfano's word for this. After all, she has a doctoral degree in elementary education and was an elementary schoolteacher, a day-care center director and a college instructor before joining the Play Lab in 1979.

The lab, created in 1968, initially was called the Child Research Center, the first of its kind in the toy industry, according to Fisher-Price. Here's how it works:

Kathleen Alfano, Fisher-Price Toys

Fisher-Price enlists kiddy volunteers from three age groups: infants and toddlers up to 2 years old; preschool children, ages 2 to 4; and school-age kids, ages 5 and 6.

The oldest group meets once per week for six to eight weeks, in groups usually consisting of three boys and three girls. The middle group meets twice a week for the same duration and is composed of the same number of boys and girls. The infants and toddlers typically meet on Friday mornings, but also on an as-needed basis.

The children are recruited from an area within an hour's drive of Fisher-Price headquarters in East Aurora, New York, about 20 miles south of Buffalo. The waiting list to become a tiny toy tester is about two years long.

In these loosely structured sessions, kids move freely about a room that includes one or more toys that Fisher-Price is considering putting on the market. Alfano and her colleagues observe how the youngsters interact with the toys.

"You really can't ask children what they think about something, as to why they like it or don't like it until they're about 5," Alfano says. So she and her colleagues only ask the school-age group what features might make a toy more fun.

Depending on what they say, a toy prototype may then be returned to Fisher-Price designers to be modified. The altered plaything then will be reviewed by children again -- often by the same group that made the initial critique.

While children in the preschool group can talk, they can't always explain the pros and cons of a product very well. "If they don't like it, they'll say, 'Can I go play now?'" Alfano says. "Even though it looks like they're playing, if it's not fun and they're not engaged in it, it becomes work to them."

Although these junior testers are from a specific geographic region, Alfano says she has no concerns that children in Miami, Milan or Manila will react differently once a product is marketed.

"I've traveled around the world and around the United States and observed children at play, and in addition, talked to many teachers," she says. "Children play the same. The differences are in the culture, and perhaps in the parents and what they expect."

And in the language. "Animal sounds are one of the first things children learn, no matter what culture they're in," Alfano says. "For a cat, we say 'meow' and in other cultures they say something different. We say a frog says 'ribbit' and in another culture it's something different. So we have to rearrange the speech we put in our toys."

But the basic way that children play with toys is universal, Alfano says. "When I've visited children in other countries, translators tell me what 3-year-olds are saying to each other. Children do the same things. When they pick up the phone, they pretend to call their mommy. When they want a toy that another child has, they'll say, 'Gimme, gimme -- it's mine.'

"When children open a box and play with a toy, when they interact with each other, I don't know whether I'm in Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Detroit or Buffalo -- children play the same," Alfano says.

While Alfano sees no differences in how children from different cultures play, she says she has noticed generational changes in her 21 years at Fisher-Price. Oh, sure, kids still like playing dress-up. They still enjoy staples including modeling clay, finger paints, puzzles and books.

"What's different," she says, "is their expectations, their comfort with technology. It's very common now when a child sees a plush toy to poke it around and expect it to talk or to turn on. Moms do this too. I've heard parents say, 'Well, what does this do?'"

HITS AND MISSES
	Over the years, Fisher-Price has tested a lot of toys. Some went over quickly, others were given the thumbs-down by child-critics, both in the Play Laboratory in Aurora, New York, and on the market. Have a look.

The other change Alfano says she sees is a blurring of gender roles in play. Toy kitchens and vacuum cleaners are as apt to be boys' toys as girls' gadgets, she says. But even little boys draw the line somewhere, she says -- they're still not devoted to dolls.

With so many toys now fitted with so many bells and whistles, it's a marvel that some of the old standards keep right on selling, year after year, decade after decade. Mattel's Barbie. Hasbro's Mr. Potato Head. Slinky. And at Fisher-Price, View-Master and Rock-a-Stack.

The last is simple: Toddlers simply place colorful rings atop a cone. "We've had this for 40 years and it's still one of our Top 10 best-sellers," Alfano says.

Toy titans haven't figured out a way to predict which products have staying power, of course, or there'd be no flops. "There's something intrinsic and interesting in itself beyond the ages," Alfano says of the classics. "You don't really know what's going to make it."

Feedback from children, their parents and toy buyers is taken seriously by Fisher-Price, but sometimes the company goes forward with a product based on the gut feeling of its staffers, Alfano says.

One such case was Rocket the Wonder Dog, a new toy that sells for about $105 and is aimed at children ages 3 and up. The robotic dog is voice-activated and has eyes and eyebrows that move, giving him the appearance of having emotions, Alfano says.

The Play Lab was unable to get a test model, however, until late in the production process because of the complicated electronics involved in the toy, Alfano says. "We were just going on the strength of conviction that this is a fair product that children are going to really like."

Eventually introduced to kids at the Play Lab, Rocket was a hit, Alfano says. "The little girls wanted to hug it and give it a kiss," she says. "The boys wanted to pet it and were emotionally involved with it."

Rocket and robotic dogs being sold by other toy makers were also popular with children brought together recently by USA Today for a story.

Alfano estimates that no more than one of 10 toy prototypes screened by lab tots makes it on the shelves of toy stores. But even a product receiving kiddy kudos is not assured of success.

"The children are a predictor of play value, of interest, of a good toy -- but not of success," Alfano says. "Success in the market is a mixture of packaging, of price, people willing to buy it and competition. There are many toys that are wonderful but they didn't sell well. But kids like them."

Still, it's fun getting children's often unpredictable reactions to a toy, Alfano says. Take the case of Toots the Train. By using voice commands of "go" and "stop" a child can control the train's movement. But what lab tykes really loved was that when Toots derailed, he'd say, "I love to go off-roading."

"They got so excited about it," Alfano says. "They liked it going off the track, because they liked what he said. And they thought it was cool that the train knew it was off the track. So they made a play pattern out of something that we thought would just give them a clue to put it back on the track.

"Sometimes children do things that take us by surprise."

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Fisher-Price Toys
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Slinky Toys

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