[grueful]

My knee-jerk response to that: Do they make pink girly legos? Maybe there are reasons why that's the wrong approach, but I tend to regard interaction and packaging as two very distinct design components. If the packaging is the problem, fix that first.

Changing the interaction should come second. Dumbing it down is almost never the solution, yet it's often the first solution people turn to when trying to deal with a gender gap. It's as if they think the issues will go away if they speak very slowly and loudly.

(I admire the objective, but I believe I would like the project better if it said "an engineering toy" instead of "the engineering toy." The implication differs.)

[bjt]

"Do they make pink girly legos?"

Why yes, yes they do: http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx

They're controversial for the same reasons people are complaining on this thread, but they're selling. (See http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/09/lego-friends-tr...)

[grueful]

My experience is limited to sisters, but they played with the normal legos just as much as I did. I suspect these would have been a hit.

Users care about things like color far more than engineers often suspect. If changing the color makes a substantive improvement to outcomes you care about - change the color.

[Rolo0321]

I think there's a bit more to this toy than simply 'pink it and shrink it' as they say in retail.

The story + building is the innovation - meeting girls where they are and presenting construction/engineering themes through something other than a jumble of Legos. (This coming from a girl who loved Legos but didn't end up as an engineer)