It is tough buying educational toys because, well, how would you actually measure whether something is educational, especially when it involves very young children even toddlers? Actually, numerous child psychologists believe that just about anything is “educational” for a child, particularly at really young ages when almost by definition anything they come into contact with teaches them something about the world, about which they know virtually nothing!
When you do not know a lot to begin with, everything is educational, isn’t it? And so the world is full of educational toys as a result, as any object may be played with and, in the very playing with, help to develop the motor skills and cognitive abilities which toymakers claim their products foster in a child.
And yet clearly there are toys that do seem to somehow provide a lot more than entertainment value, such as programmable robot kits. So perhaps a better way to think about educational toys is to not regard them as being absolutely educational or not, in which case it is arguable that a plaything could be made of almost anything and that play itself is an inherently educational activity.
The misunderstandings, as ever (according to most semanticists, anyway), concerns semantics, or meaning. If we mean by the term not merely something that can be played with such that skillsets of some kind are fostered, but instead those toys which are obviously much more capable of fostering a skillset, particularly one that is not readily developed otherwise, then shopping becomes substantially easier!
Thus, it will turn out that puzzles like a Rubik’s Cube are very educational while alphabet blocks are much less so. And as parents, we want to encourage our kids to not only explore but push their intellectual envelope, so while good old-fashioned dolls and the like might stimulate the imagination, a lot more ingenious toys can also stimulate such higher-order faculties as pattern recognition and problem solving.