Nate Lau talks about Tegu toys, take 324. Action!
Hi, I am Nate Lau and I am Tegu’s Sultan of Sketch. Essentially what that means is I have the best job in the whole company. I get to wake up on the West Coast, 3 hours later roll out of bed, sit down, and start sketching. What I am doing is dreaming up new big ideas, new great ideas for Tegu to bring to market, for you.
The Blocks
We are launching our original set with 4 shapes of blocks. We’ve got our cube, our short plank, we’ve got our long plank and we’ve got the shape here which we call the candy bar. These pieces all have magnets hidden in very specific places that aid in the play of these blocks. One thing you’ll notice is that, you know, if you think back to your science class in the fourth grade, magnets have a north and the south pole. Now some of the magnets are oriented with north facing out and some of them oriented with south facing out. So if you get the north and south together, the blocks go together and that’s how they stick. However, if you get north and north facing the same way, the blocks will repel.
Tegu Math
The pieces are all designed off with this simple one cube unit. Each unit is 30 millimeters by 30 millimeters by 30 millimeters. You take the long plank, the long plank is a quarter of a cube tall and it’s 4 cubes wide. The candy bar is half a cube tall by 3 cubes wide. The short plank is the same height as the long plank which is a quarter of a cube tall but it’s 2 cubes wide, and then here we have the final 30 millimeter cube.
The Secret Recipe
You’re probably wondering how we get the magnets inside the tangled blocks. Well… I’ll tell you… at the end of the day, this is what comes out. The perfect Tegu block and now you now the secrets of how the magnets get inside.
Hidden Lessons
One of the things we love about Tegu blocks is that there all these hidden lessons. Lessons that can be learned through nothing more complicated than just play. You get a kid playing with these blocks without even knowing they’re learning about fractions, they’re learning about scale, they’re learning hand-eye coordination, they’re learning motor skills, they’re learning sharing, and all these lessons are unlocked with something without them even knowing, and all they’re doing is really just playing with blocks.
Our Mission
We’re all creative guys, we love making things. We wanna create and bring toys to the market that will really allow that creative genius inside every child to flourish, because we know it’s in there, and we know that given the right toys, given the right opportunity, and the right nurturing, every child has the opportunity to create great things.
