Rainbow Loom toy brings fun to rubber bands

ERJ staff report (TP)

Michigan – Rainbow Loom is a craft set currently enjoying great popularity with young school children across the US.

The toy costs about $15-17 (€10.87-12.33) and consists of a plastic pegboard and a bag of multi-coloured rubber bands.

With the loom, kids can make bracelets and other forms of jewellery, and enjoy a return to an age of old-fashioned playtime.

Cheng Choon Ng, an engineer, invented the Rainbow Loom while playing with his daughters.

The first type was simply a wooden board and push pins, but from his Michigan living room Choon Ng invested his family’s $10,000 (€7,254) life savings to drive the product to a commercial success.

Figures from the New York Times, in August, show that just over a million Rainbow Loom units had been sold.

The toy has caught the imagination of children, as one father − Jordan Shapiro, a Forbes contributor, explained.

“When I recently bought Rainbow Looms for my two sons (6 and 8), I discovered that this is really a tangible/virtual hybrid toy,” he said.

“They sit for hours, searching, starting, and stopping instructional YouTube videos on the iPad.

“They are learning how to mediate between the material world and the digital world.”

In the US there are presently 969,500 monthly YouTube searches for ‘Rainbow Loom’, and even more if design specific searches are included.

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Full story from Forbes

Official Rainbow Loom site