7 Conclusion: Oversized Optics in the Digital Age

In 2014, the maker of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) toys GoldieBlox released GoldieBlox and the Movie Machine, a construction set with an accompanying storybook (figure 7.1) The book chronicles the efforts of Goldie and her friends to save their local film festival (cancelled due to a broken projector). To solve the problem, Goldie proposes they build a giant zoetrope to exhibit short films. Using step-by-step instructions, the book guides girls through the process of building their own zoetrope alongside Goldie and her friends. The kit comes with several preprinted and blank picture strips for girls to make their own animations and advertises a companion mobile app for additional experiments in stop-motion techniques. The cultural and economic conditions motivating GoldieBlox's production of a zoetrope kit in the twenty-first century share many features with those supporting the toy's initial sale in the nineteenth. Whereas optical toys originally responded to concerns about children's home recreation and cultivated the visual subjectivity of an expanding middle class, the GoldieBlox kit reflects anxieties associated with the decline of the middle class. The GoldieBlox movie machine, and many other zoetrope kits like it, frames optical play as STEM play, a pastime perceived today to be key to economic growth and opportunity.
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The zoetrope's long life and its contemporary instantiation as a STEM toy demonstrate the enduring connection that optical toys have to the visual and cultural constructions of childhood. Such toys are not obsolete technologies displaced by newer media but are alive and well in today's playscape.