Price Tag: $26.00
Official URL: playskool.com
Rating:

The “Busy Ball Popper” is a toddler toy that keeps kids attention far longer than I ever imagined that it would, and that seems to be highly appealing across a wide range of ages.

When my son was 24 months old his 26 month old friend and the friend’s little 10 month old brother came to visit. This toy was the biggest cross-age range hit among them and the boys had a blast putting the balls into the chute, chasing after them, and batting them back down the chute when they were trying to come up.

WHAT IT DOES & HOW IT WORKS

This toy consists of the “ball popper”, and five multi-colored  lightweight soft plastic balls (similar to what is used in ball pits, but slightly smaller). The “Ball popper” moves the balls from the left , around a circular ramp in either direction, down through a hole onto a ramp that brings the balls over to the right side of the toy where they go through a purple tunnel, down into the toy again. The balls then are pushed by the toy straight up and out the left side, where they either pop out slowly and fall back onto the track, or they pop out quickly and go flying for your child to chase. The whole toy is operated by a fan on the lower right side of the toy that sucks air in from the right side and shoots the air toward the left.

The toy is started up by pressing down on a big red plunger. This starts up the fan and the sound effects. There are 8 different songs and a bunch of sound effects. The music has a distinct “toy” feeling about it, and it’s loud. But it’s fun.

PARENT FRIENDLY FEATURES

The music and fan run for less than a minute and then shut off. This prevents parental insanity by only making noise when your child feeds it with balls and pushes on the plunger.

There is an off switch lower half of the unit so that you can turn it off when you no longer want to listen to the music. My son was perfectly happy putting the balls in and dumping them out when the plunger didn’t create the usual whirling singing ball popping experience.

FEAR FACTOR, FUN FACTOR

Don’t be shocked if this toy startles your child at first. My son startled, turned around, ran away, and started screaming and pointing at it. We shut it off and let him play with just putting the balls into it and we’d dump them back out. After about a week of doing this, we turned the music on without the balls, and let him listen to that and get used to the sound effects, music, and the whooshing of the air. Once that was done, we put one ball into it. After we introduced it to him gradually this way he suddenly decided it was his favorite toy and wouldn’t leave it alone for a good week solid.

The music is bit on the loud side, and the fan is slightly loud as well. Think of a hair drier turned onto the “low” setting. Yeah, noisy. You can see why a kid might need to warm up to it a bit.

EDUCATIONAL ASPECTS

The primary purpose of this toy is to encourage your child to have fun and play. It’s not really a toy that I’d point out as being educational. That said, this toy offers a wide range of things for your child to observe and learn from, as well as encouraging your child to practice hand-eye coordination, finding hidden objects, object tracking, and a variety of other skills. My two year old was also quick to pick up on cause and effect and delighted in attempting to reproduce different scenarios such as “make all the balls stay in the popper” or “have them come shooting out of the popper”, and even a version of whack a mole where he’d bash the ball back down as soon as it came up. It might not sound impressive, but that requires a good deal of concentration and timing for a two year old to master.

SAFETY

This newer version of the Busy Ball Popper fixes a safety concern of the older version. How do you know that you have the new version? Simple. If it has a purple angle cap over the right side, it’s the new version. This angled cap prevents your child from pushing their arm into the right side of the toy where it was liable to become stuck. (The older version also had a different color scheme, so it’s rather difficult to confuse the two.)

The fan is enclosed in the purple area at the bottom right of the toy. It is fully encased and there is no way that a little hand could find their way into the fan. The plastic mesh on the front has no holes in it that are large enough for small fingertips.

BOTTOM LINE

My son loved it, and it kept him and his friends busy chasing balls, batting at them, and having fun. It was great watching them work together to bring the balls into the popper, and it kept them engaged enough so that normal playdate squabbles and jealousy over sharing didn’t surface.  I’d call it an ideal playdate toy for toddlers.

I DO have to admit, though, that this toy tends to disappear between playdates. Only part of that is to keep it “new”. The other part of it is that it’s easy for parents to tire of retrieving the balls and listening to the music. Yeah, it only plays for 30 seconds… But apparently this toy can keep your child’s attention for quite a few 30 second intervals. Good and bad at the same time.