Toys that encourage "making"

I interact with toys in three primary roles: a mom, an educator, and a person who likes to play with toys. I find that I'm drawn to similar types of toys in all three roles. I like toys that don't tell you how you should play - toys that allow and encourage different forms of play. In short, I like toys that let you "Make" things or experiences.

As a mom, I like my child to play with building toys, art toys, and toys that encourage make believe. Blocks, Legos, magnetic building shapes, tinker toys, crayons, paints, playdoh are some of our favorite building and art supplies. For make believe, some of the same toys - especially Legos encourage stories and make-believe, but also hats, a kid-size kitchen and household items like brooms and dishes.

As a STEM educator, I want my students to engage with toys that help then engage in science and engineering practices. I want them to design things, build things, and try to explain. This means I like materials for building robots, simple CAD-type software and programming interfaces like Scratch (yes I consider software toys), and things like magnets and oobleck that create opportunities to make sometimes surprising observations.

As a person who likes to play with toys, I like these same kinds of toys --  Legos and robotics -- things I can put together and manipulate on my own - and arts and craft supplies and tools.

What I tend not to like are toys that want you to "push a button" to make something specific happen. This is often a "feature" of electronic toys and electronic aspects added to other toys (a farm that neighs when you push the right spot) or otherwise invite play in only one specific "right" way.