Here’s a Kickstarter campaign that everyone should know about. Inventor and Stanford  engineer Debbie Sterling has created GoldieBlox, a spacial design toy with girls in mind. While many well-known construction toy companies simply color their same toys pink or stay within the confines of domestic and princess themes in order to market to girls, GoldieBlox does so much more.

GoldieBlox is a book and construction toy all-in-one. It stars Goldie, an adventurous girl inventor who builds simple machines. Children can build the same machines that Goldie builds, using their tool kit. The GoldieBlox combination of building + literacy is perfectly suited to girls’ well-documented love of reading. As Sterling states, “It appeals to girls because they aren’t just interested in ‘what’ they’re building…they want to know ‘why’.”

In her Kickstart video, Sterling explains her inspiration and why GoldieBlox is an important addition to any little girl’s toy chest:

You want your little girl to play with GoldieBlox because as much as she likes dress up and princess stuff, and don’t get me wrong, I like that stuff too. There’s so much more to her than that. She  can explore every opportunity to become anything she wants to be when she grows up. The thing is 89 percent of engineers are male. So we literally live in a man’s world. Yet 50 percent of the population is female. So if we want to live in a better world we need girls building these things too and we need girls solving these problems.

I can easily imagine how much my own five year old daughter would go crazy for GoldieBlox. Yes, my daughter loves princesses, playing dress up and pink. But as Sterling suggests, there is so much more to her than that. She also loves constructions and every day I find my daughter creating odd little machines made from house hold objects, building blocks and random art supplies. I would love to see a world where my mini-engineer could grow her love of building, so I will be thrilled to see GoldieBlox hit the stores.

Sterling spent her life savings building and testing one sample and started the Kickstarter campaign to get Goldieblox into mass production. Through Kickstarter, Sterling has already raised well over her $150,000 goal which means that the first toy is going into production and several new GoldieBlox constructions are already being developed!