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The latest toy craze is here, making waves in households across the country, and it's basically glorified bubble wrap. Featured recently in The New York Times, Pop Its have enthralled kids everywhere with their satisfying poppable blisters. Here's what you need to know about these flexible silicone toys and how they might benefit kids.

Where Pop It Fidget Toys Originated

The story of Pop It Fidget Toy begins with Theo and Ora Coster, a married couple from Israel. Over the years, they invented more than 190 games—including the face recognition game Guess Who?—and founded a company called Theora Design, according to the BBC. (Amazing fact: Theo was actually a classmate of Anne Frank.)

When Ora's sister died from breast cancer in the mid-1970s, she had a dream about a field of breasts. "Imagine a field of breasts, that you can press from one side, and then press from the other side," Boaz Coster, her son and co-C.E.O. of Theora Design, said when describing his mother's vision. Theo created a prototype, and it sat around for many years until the couple's sons sold it to Montreal-based games company FoxMind.

FoxMind manufactured the product in silicone, and it was marketed as a game called Last One Lost, a puzzle in which two players press the bubbles together, and the player who presses the last one loses. It debuted in 2013 and was not exactly a smash, but in 2019, it relaunched under the name Pop It! and hit Target shelves.