Uberstix Taps Kids’ Unlimited Potential

The creations can be as industrial or as whimsical, as simple or as complex as kids want.

Five years ago, Dane Scarborough’s 11-year-old son asked him if he loved his job. At the time, Scarborough was the owner and managing director of a company that manufactured precision measuring tools for the construction trade. This simple question caused him to sell his company, briefly retire, and then start Überstix (ToyShow), a building system made up of eight parts that can be connected to create boats that float, planes that fly and buildings as tall as the ceiling.

“You can look at anything and see the potential for improvement,” Scarborough, now president and CEO of Überstix, told TDmonthly Magazine.

Scarborough looked at the building systems available to kids and thought he could design a better system — a system accessible to all kids and one in which the structures they built worked.

Scarborough achieved this and more. Kids can incorporate commonplace objects such as paperclips, straws and Popsicle sticks into the designs. A water bottle makes the boat float, egg cartons are castle walls, and a shower cap transforms a polygon into a Frisbee.

Scarborough believes that kids have tremendous potential, and he wanted to create a building system that would allow them to use their problem-solving skills and creativity.

" When an engineer or architect designs something, unless it is strictly utilitarian, they have an aesthetic in mind," he told TDmonthly. "The challenge is to achieve that aesthetic while maintaining the structural integrity of the project. Kids solve these same problems when they build.

And what they build is limited only by their imaginations. According to a math-whiz friend of Scarborough’s son, the total different ways to put four Überstix pieces together is 125,757,744,913,221,000, which is 7 billion times the 1.75 millions species discovered on earth.

But Scarborough doesn’t want kids to be intimidated by that statistic. The creations can be as industrial or as whimsical, as simple or as complex as kids want. The point is to discover something new every day — new ways to connect the parts, new parts created by modifying existing ones, new structures that grow out of the builder’s imagination.

Toys break. As Scarborough sees it, if an Überstix part breaks you have two choices: you can cry like a baby or you can take an emery board and nail clippers and create a new component. And you don’t have to wait until a part breaks to do this. The Überstix parts are meant to be modified. In fact, the basic Überstix I-stick can be modified into at least five different components.

Überstix are also designed to be compatible with other manufacturer’s toys — Lego, K’Nex and Zoobs.

“We want to be an integration hub,” said Scarborough, whose ideal is for kids to optimize their creativity by using all the building systems together. In fact, he wanted to market Überstix with one of the other building systems, but that company refused to promote their product in conjunction with another manufacturer’s product.

To Scarborough that attitude is self-defeating: “It’s not us versus them. It’s about opening up potential.”

What follows is more information on a few Überstix products.