When she was a little girl, Shannon McClintock's favorite toys were blocks. Although she also liked dolls and other traditional "girl stuff," her favorite activity was building ramps and bridges. McClintock, of San Diego, Calif., says her parents always encouraged her to express herself creatively and made sure she had the tools to do so.

McClintock's early interest in building never left her: last year she was the grand prize winner in the sixth annual Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge. Her project, related to train braking, was a classic feat of good engineering.

It's this type of hands-on experience that results in the best engineers and architects later in life, says David Elkind, Ph.D., a child developmental psychologist, professor emeritus of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and author of The Hurried Child (Perseus Publishing; 3rd edition, 2001). The first thing he likes to see when he walks into any classroom is building blocks.

"When children are building, they're seeing things they haven't seen before," Elkind says. "Blocks are an ideal fundamental toy because they don't come with instructions that children are supposed to follow. They become whatever a child wants them to become."

They may be just toys to us and to our children, but blocks, even for children, were originally more than just playthings. Witold Rybczynski, professor of urbanism at Pennsylvania State University and author of Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture (Penguin, 1992), says that building toys were not originally for fun.

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