#1610: Quartermastoy

Today’s invention is for parents of young children. It’s a toy-organising chest-of drawers.

New toys almost always come in a bar-coded box. Each of these would be scanned by a parent on entry to one of the glass-fronted drawers. These would have the ability to weigh each box added to them.

A child would be able to enter a code given to it to extract the next toy of choice, only if it had placed some other toy in its box, scanned it and replaced it in the cupboard somewhere.

Parents could set the system to allow a child say x active, out-of-cupboard toys at any one time.

The cupboard could gamify the process further by awarding access to additional or surprise toys and games from inside it after a period of sustained playing with a variety of things and then clearing up (without eg trying to enter boxes only half-full of Lego or obsessing about only one toy for weeks).