How Traditional Indian Toys Shaped STEM Education in India

Imagine this: The 1920s in Kolkata. A young boy, utterly enthralled, crouches on the ground. His cart-drum (Gaadi-Baja) beats and rumbles as wooden wheels spin. In an attempt to understand the magic of the Cart-Drum, he tilts it this way and that while observing its physics.

In 2025, we will be in the same city. We are the same age and share the same curiosity, but now there is another child. She is hunching over a laptop, learning how to make a LEGO Mindstorms robot avoid obstacles. Different instruments. The same question.

Even though they are a century apart, they are studying the same concepts: how machines think, how challenges inspire creativity, and how ideas become reality through practical experience.

The unasked question is this: Why did we spend the following century acting as though we lacked this understanding, despite having it in the 1920s?

When Traditional Indian Toys Were the Best STEM Teachers

Here’s something that might surprise you about India’s educational heritage:Long before anyone coined the term “STEM education,” Indian craftsmen were already practicing it. Sure, they used wood and metal instead of circuit boards, but they were teaching the same engineering principles we celebrate today.

Walk through any old bazaar in Varanasi, Mumbai, or Delhi back then, and you’d find incredible mechanical toys and not just simple spinning tops, but true engineering marvels disguised as playthings. In a way, they were India’s original robotics education platforms.

That spinning wind-wheel from Varanasi? It was teaching centrifugal force and energy systems. The balancing toy from Puri? A hands-on STEM lesson in gravity and equilibrium.

Those jigging puppets from Rajasthan? Lever mechanics and mechanical engineering, pure and simple. And the famous cart-drum (Gaadi-Baja) from Kolkata showed kids how rolling motion transforms energy into sound.Even the wobbling pencil toy (Ullu ka Pattha) from Delhi was basically a masterclass in precision engineering.

But here’s what really made these traditional Indian toys revolutionary as learning tools, where kids learned by doing. They’d grab a toy, play with it, break it (accidentally, of course), fix it, and slowly figure out how it worked. No textbooks. No lectures. Just pure experiential learning and hands-on discovery. Cause and effect, design thinking, and problem-solving,  all right there in their hands.

And this wasn’t just a casual pastime either. Toy-making was a serious innovation, a full-fledged ecosystem of STEM learning. Families worked together: women prepared materials, children added finishing touches, and men tackled the tricky mechanical assemblies. Skills and technical knowledge flowed down through generations, with each person adding their own creativity, craftsmanship, and improvements.

How India Lost Its Indigenous STEM Education Heritage

So what happened to this amazing tradition of learning through play?After independence, India was busy building a new nation. We looked to the West for inspiration, especially in education and technology. The new system became all about textbooks, theory, and exams. Working with your hands? That got labeled as “vocational training,” which was often just code for “not smart enough for real academics.”

Traditional toy-making and craft skills were pushed aside. Artisans lost their livelihoods as cheap plastic toys began flooding in from abroad. And no one in the education system thought of these mechanical toys as real teaching tools or legitimate STEM resources.

That beautiful connection between making and learning, between traditional craft and modern innovation, just broke.

By the 1980s, the irony was hard to ignore. Western countries were developing educational robotics programs that celebrated hands-on learning. MIT had its LEGO Lab, and Seymour Papert was transforming how children learned through constructionist education building, experimenting, and discovering. Early programmable robots were showing up in classrooms, teaching the very same principles Indian craftsmen had mastered generations earlier.

Meanwhile, India’s education system had forgotten its own centuries-old tradition of learning by making. We started importing Western educational models and technologies to teach kids the same STEM principles our ancestors had already woven into traditional toys.Talk about irony.

Then came the real disconnect and design thinking went missing. Schools began to divide everything into neat little boxes: thinking in one, feeling in another, making in a third. Science came from textbooks, not from tinkering. Engineering became something to study at university, not something to explore as a curious child through hands-on play.

All that indigenous knowledge and craft-based learning that once made STEM tangible and human? It ended up gathering dust in museums, forgotten by the very nation that pioneered it.

Educational Robotics Awakening: Rediscovering India's STEM Heritage

The 21st century brought a much-needed wake-up call for Indian education.Across the world, educational robotics and STEM innovation were exploding with Arduino kits, Raspberry Pi computers, and AI-powered learning systems inspiring a new generation of makers and thinkers.

And slowly, a few Indian educators began asking the uncomfortable questions:Why are we always looking outside for answers?

Why are we importing educational technology when our own culture has a legacy of learning by making that goes back centuries?

And then the realization hit: modern educational robots and STEM toys aren’t really teaching anything new. LEGO Mindstorms? It’s doing exactly what those traditional jigging puppets once did, teaching mechanical principles through play.

Arduino projects? The same engineering concepts as the Cart-Drum, just with programming added in.Raspberry Pi learning? Still about understanding systems through hands-on experimentation.

Sure, now we can code them and add layers of digital tech, but the core lesson hasn’t changed one bit, learn by building, understand by doing, and develop skills through trial and error.

Slowly, things began to shift. Museums started documenting traditional Indian toys as educational artifacts. Design schools grew interested in heritage crafts and indigenous innovation. And a few forward-thinking teachers brought toy-making back into their classrooms, not out of nostalgia, but because it genuinely works as a STEM teaching method.

But let’s be honest, we’ve still got a long way to go.

Traditional artisans are barely hanging on, despite their incredible technical skills and deep understanding of mechanics. Teacher training programs rarely mention indigenous teaching methods or culturally rooted STEM education. And while schools spend thousands of rupees on imported robotics kits, homegrown innovations and traditional learning tools often sit forgotten in the corner.

Bringing Traditional Innovation Together with Modern Educational Technology

So here’s where we are today: India stands at a crossroads in educational innovation.We can keep importing STEM models and technologies from abroad or we can wake up to what we already have: a world-class tradition of hands-on learning that just needs to be dusted off and reconnected to modern educational robotics.

Imagine classrooms where children begin by building mechanical toys, absorbing physics and engineering principles naturally through traditional crafts. Then they move on to programming robots based on those same STEM concepts. Picture local artisans teaching design thinking and craftsmanship alongside robotics instructors, where traditional Indian toys aren’t museum relics, but living, breathing learning tools that bridge heritage and innovation.

We’re not saying throw away the robots and go back to only wooden toys, that would be silly and dismiss real technological progress. But why can’t the smartest educational robot of tomorrow build on the wisdom of those simple mechanical wonders from Kolkata or Delhi?

Why can’t we blend traditional Indian knowledge systems with cutting-edge STEM technology? Why must it always be one or the other?

The journey from mechanical toys to smart machines isn’t a straight line through technological advancement. It’s a circle we need to closely connect traditional learning with modern innovation, indigenous craftsmanship with contemporary STEM skills, and cultural heritage with future-ready education.

The Future of STEM Education in India: Reclaiming Our Heritage

India doesn’t need to “catch up” with global educational robotics or STEM education.We simply need to remember that we had this figured out ages ago and use that foundation of hands-on learning and traditional innovation to leap ahead of everyone else.

The toys are still here. The artisans still have the skills and knowledge to make them. The indigenous wisdom hasn’t disappeared; it’s just waiting for us to notice again, to recognize its value in shaping modern education.

What if every STEM program in India began with traditional toys before moving on to robots?What if we trained the next generation of innovators by first grounding them in our heritage of mechanical excellence? What if educational technology companies collaborated with traditional craftsmen to create hybrid learning tools that honor both the past and the future?

The technology has evolved, yes, but the principles haven’t changed.And that’s the beautiful truth about educational innovation: it often comes from remembering what we already knew. Children learn best through play, experimentation, and hands-on discovery, something India mastered centuries ago.

Sometimes the best way forward in STEM education is to remember what we knew all along.