We believe that a Toca Builders play session should be as much, or even more, about the entire process of building and playing through creation, as it is to achieve specific construction goals.

One thing you may notice when playing Toca Builders with your child is that apart from the main theme of building worlds, it’s as much fun to play around in the created worlds, making up little stories. The founder of Goldiblox, Debbie Sterling, has talked about drawing girls into construction play using stories and books, and I love this quote about using stories from Mårten Brüggemann, Play Designer at Toca Boca: What I like about Toca Builders is that it is very gender neutral – the robot characters are carefully designed and there is a full range of block colours to choose from: blue, pink and everything in between. More specifically this week there has been discussion about whether we need specific girl-friendly construction toys like the new Goldiblox toys or not. I have seen lots of tweets on my Twitter feed recently about the increasing segregation of girls’ and boys’ toys, an issue highlighted by the Let Toys be Toys campaign. It’s rare that something achieves this honour – The Tales of Peter Rabbit on CBeebies is their other current For Real Life game – so well done Toca Boca! Luckily, with emphasis on the word pretend.

Mr Tall and Little Miss Chatterbox have been running around the house shouting “I’m the smasher!” or “I’m the runner!” and pretending to build walls, break doors and paint the furniture. This app has just received one of the highest accolades in our house – it is being played For Real Life.

For younger children, it’s all about experimenting, discovering and playing, while older children can also get to grips with building something more complex if they want to.

Toca Builders is a construction toy app, and has been described as Minecraft for younger children or virtual Lego.

Toca builders review