Intertek hosts first STEM Toy Fair in Hong Kong featuring its innovative STEM Toy Mark

18 Jul 2019

Helping manufacturers, parents and children to identify safe STEM toys

Intertek Hong Kong has organised the first STEM Toy Fair in Hong Kong at Olympian City – the prominent shopping mall owned by Sino Group. The event, held from July 11 to 14, successfully promoted Intertek’s newly launched innovative STEM Toy Mark Scheme and provided our customers a valuable opportunity to reach consumers directly to promote their STEM toy products.

Held at the central atrium of the mall, the STEM toy fair has seen 16 exhibitors, including toy producers and education institutions, bring together more than 30 types of fascinating toy products from Spain, Sweden, Britain, South Korea and other countries to the fun-filled fair by displaying them at their booths.

A separated “STEM Toys Play Zone” allowed children and parents to experience playing with 30 toys which are age-appropriate to the children and verified as safe STEM Toys under our Intertek STEM Mark Scheme. These include the letter-based bricks for children to learn spelling, matching with hand eye coordination and the drink straw construction toy to stimulate children’s creativity and curiosity in science.

Intertek’s “STEM Toy Mark Scheme” not only assures the safety of toy products, but also verifies that the toys can engage kids in hands-on exploration of STEM activities and inspire their imagination to create and invent. Parents and children can truly indulge in STEM learning activities in a joyous atmosphere.

Intertek experts shared safety tips with the customers at the Fair. Dorothy Lau, Director, Toys & Hardlines, introduced the importance of identifying quality assured products and Dr. Nelson Chan, Vice-President, Product Assurance advised customers about some recall cases relating to STEM toys. We also had the pleasure to invite Ann O’Hara, Intertek Executive Vice President, Global Products to visit the Toy Fair in the evening when she was in Hong Kong on business. She had fun talking to the exhibitors and playing with different STEM toys. She even purchased a balanced STEM toy for our HK office. Thanks Ann!

Justin Wong, Associate President, Union Enterprises says: “Parents are eager to arouse their children’s interests in topics such as science and technology. Not only do teachers and parents feel confident in purchasing toys with the Intertek STEM Toy Mark, they can also select truly educational STEM toys from an overwhelming number of self-declared "STEM-labelled toy products" for children. We’re confident our end-users can identify safe and real STEM toys with the Intertek STEM Mark.”

The STEM Toy Mark Scheme is an innovation from Intertek Hong Kong. STEM toys from around the world can be assessed against our checklist of STEM elements, which was developed together with International academics specialising in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and evaluated by our STEM experts to see if they can be qualified as STEM toys under our Scheme. These toys must also pass regulatory safety compliance tests in their selling markets.