By washing your hands regularly, it is the best way to help prevent getting sick. However, knowing that will not make your kid want to wash their hands any more than they already do.
One day Michael Reiter had asked his kids to wash their hands. Like always, they kept putting it off. Around the forth reminder, they finally did what he had asked. Although it was not uncommon for them to wet them a little and take off, on this day Michael was inspired. North County Times reports that Michael created the Bub’bloop, a device that would make handwashing fun.
Reiter’s toy, a plastic ball that comes in six neon colors, is decorated with a single blue eye and covered in soft spikes. It sits in a silver “UFO-shaped” base, and children are encouraged to squish and squeeze the ball —- and thus spend more time washing their hands —- by tapping the ball into the base filled with liquid soap and squeezing it to make bubbles.
“The kids just pick it up, start playing with it. It works and it’s fun,” Reiter said. “The response has been very positive.”
Reiter said he spent more than a year on research and development, working on prototypes in his garage, testing the toy first on his own kids, Zachery, now 10, and Caitlin, now 8, and then friends’ children.
Rappaport said the allure for children of Reiter’s invention is not that it cleans hands, but that it’s good, clean fun.
“For some goofy reason, the magic is that when you squeeze it, it makes a bubble. The little valve lets the air come in and not go out, and that makes a bubble. That one simple act of making a bubble is fun. It just happens to be something that cleans your hands, too,” he said.
Photo from Bub’bloop