Toyhouse is a combination of physical and digital spaces dedicated to help creative people practice and develop their joint interests. Toyhouse has a few physical playgrounds around a wide geographical area, currently all hosted in different universities in Asia. Toyhouse serves the creative communities by hosting a social networking website, and conducting international conferences, summer schools, maker camps, and semester-long classes. We also offer planning and design services for technology-assisted learning activities/environments to schools or organizations that needs external inputs.

Toyhouse aims at being an incubation platform that develops social and artistic interests using modern technologies. The short-term goal is to establish a social networking infrastructure across disciplinary boundaries that facilitate the development of playful services and products under resource and time constraints. Operationally, Toyhouse will strategically utilize the physical and human resources of local educational institutions to support global knowledge exchanges amongst artists, social entrepreneurs, technologists and government agencies. The long-term goal is to construct a global network of distributed learning organizations that collaborate in the arts of resolving social conflicts, while competes in the demonstration of technical excellence.

We choose the name "Toyhouse", because toys are creative instruments for people of all ages. Toys are safe and interesting devices that help people enjoy the adventurous processes and skill developments. As an environment for learning, there should also be protective spaces that incubate the liveliness and ensures safety in the process of toy construction and playing. Therefore the "house" term signify the "personable" physical and digital spaces in this organization. The name is in its singular form, due to the naming convention that singular form represents an entire category of similar things.

Toyhouse is a learning organization started at Tsinghua University in Beijing by Prof. Ben Koo. As an instructor for Data Structures and Database Systems, Prof. Koo designs and creates interactive learning activities that help develop intellectual and social skills using modern technologies in traditional classroom environments. Initially, Toyhouse focuses on designing learning activities related to semester-long courses, and software development camps. Overtime, Toyhouse started to collaborate with a wide range of individuals and organizations to conduct public learning activities. These activities include technology conferences and annually held summer schools co-hosted with government agencies and leading technology companies. Starting from year 2007, inspired by Prof. Cha Jian Zhong, UNESCO's Chair on Cooperation between Higher Education and Industries, Toyhouse started developing a "Learning by Playing 2.0" (LBP 2.0) approach. This approach combines the latest Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and student-driven dramatized lecture presentations to systematically remind students that learning are as fun as playing.
Starting from 2008, the Dean of Sino-Dutch Biomedical and Information Engineering School of Northeastern University, a.k.a. BMIE's Prof. Yan Kang, along with his teaching staff, Mr. Han van Triest, started working with Toyhouse to conduct various cross-campus learning activities. This includes two summer software development camps in Beijing, three international conferences on educational technologies, and a Sino-Dutch Summer School on Health and Mobile Computing. In 2010, Dr. Justin Mendez of BMIE, also joined the team on the BMIE side to help Toyhouse design and conduct various inter-disciplinary learning activities.
Due to the success of the consecutive international conferences on educational technologies, Ningbo Polytechnic’s President Su Zhi Gang, invited Prof. Koo as a visiting professor to Ningbo Polytechnic, and established a 150 square meter dedicated work-studio in the Haitian School of Mechanical Engineering. The school also provided funding to invite various international scholars and industry experts to demonstrate technologies and conduct seminars in this custom-designed work-studio. This is the first Toyhouse outside of Tsinghua University campus.
In the earlier part of 2011, Toyhouse started working with a number of Maker Spaces in China. The goal is to bring together academicians, creative technologists and interactive device artists under the same roof. A series of Maker Carnival events are already scheduled. The first one is scheduled to take place on October 15~16, 2011.
In June, 2011, Beijing Institute of Petrochemical Technology (BIPT) sent a team of delegates to witness Malaysia’s Taylor’s University’s Bi-Annual Engineering Faire, an event similar to Maker Carniva/Maker Fair as mentioned earlier. Based on the suggestion of Prof. Xu En Jiang, and Prof. Ben Koo, BIPT’s president, Guo Wen Li, decided to sponsor the October 2011 Maker Carnival on BIPT’s campus. In the following month, a Toyhouse office is established under the administration of Engineering Innovation Center, primarily with the help of a fourth year student, Jia Ting Wei, and a graduated student Xuan Guo Qin.
In August 2011, Toyhouse invited Dr. Don Wen, a social networking technology specialist, to help design the social networking aspect of learning activities in classroom-based learning environments. The idea is to let students realize that one can acquired knowledge in various forms, including working in groups, and soliciting help from people outside of their immediate social circle, using social networking technologies. The scope of this learning social network includes participants from the above-mentioned activities, such as Maker Carnivals and various academic conferences and summer camps.
An important aspect of the Toyhouse is its digital playground. The address: toyhouse.cc is a public social networking web site that records and publishes learning activities conducted by all Toyhouse members. A significant design and engineering effort is underway to create a tailor-made ICT digital infrastructure dedicated to all Toyhouse activity participants.
An ongoing effort is to offer all Toyhouse activity participants access to not only ICT tools, but also tools for creating physical products. As of 2011, Ningbo Polytechnic’s Haitian School of Mechanical Engineering started to provide a broad range of high-end manufacturing equipment to Toyhouse members. In August 2011, the Engineering Center of Beijing Institute of Petroleum Technology also started to provide manufacturing equipment to Toyhouse members.

Benjamin Koo

Toyhouse Founder

Oriol Rodríguez Morales

Toyhouse Visual Architect