When your children see you using that Makerbot Replicator, chances are, it won’t be long until they’re asking you to let them build their own plastic toys. And while you can let them loose on whatever professional modeling software you’re using, we have a feeling they’ll have an easier time playing around with the Autodesk Tinkerplay, instead.
A kid-friendly app for designing toys, it lets your kids fashion their own army of robots, monsters, and other creatures using simple drag-and-drop actions. With a hefty dose of component selections, it allows them to build elaborate-looking toys that look like they received dozens of manhours in work – a far cry from what most kids (and, let’s be honest, even adults) can actually pull off starting with a blank AutoCAD page.
Instead of simple plastic toys, Tinkerplay lets you build articulated action figures, so you can produce actual toys that can engage the kids for hours and hours of play. Want to create parts that you can’t find on the app? Not a problem, since you can use Autocad’s browser-based free TinkerCAD software to create new components that you can import into the app, giving your kids even more options for their original creations (assuming, of course, you know your way around 3D modelling).
Parts are automatically organized by color, rendering all similarly-colored components in the same batch to optimize printing time. Once done, simply snap all the parts together (all pre-designed components are sized to fit each other) and you’re done.
Tinkerplay is available as a free download on iOS, Windows, Android, and Windows Phone platforms.