Slashdot Mirror

Check out http://www.knex.com/. If you're basically just building frames, it might be the better toy^bol.

If your kid likes Roller coasters, get one their coaster building kits. Besides being wicked cool and still (mostly) made in the US, your kids (and probably you) will learn all sorts of stuff about physics, construction mechanical engineering, etc without even knowing it!

Both have excellent building guides, are very educational and fun to play with. Wedgits are great for the younger kids. K'nex roller coasters and ferris wheels would be well used and loved. K'nex teach about structural design, mechanical engineering and assembly. They start with simple, easy to assemble structures and get very complex, taking days to assemble at the high end. We also spent many, many hours building our own designs.

I prefer erector sets - you can generally get a lot more creative and functional with an erector set than you can with lego bricks. The only problem with erector sets is that they don't have nearly the money invested into them that Lego does, so you don't have things like Mindstorms, although you can improvise them with commonly available parts. Also, I like K'Nex - it provides a lot more freedom than Lego does in terms of structure and functionality (hey, build your own buckyball!).

We got our kids a large K'NEX kit http://www.knex.com/ last Christmas. It was enjoyed so much we added another big kit at birthday time.
Highly recommended.
Even though our kids were only 5 1/2 years old at the time, they could handle it quite well with just the occassional assistance from a parent in getting a difficult piece assembled.
Like LEGO, K'NEX has the generic kits for building whatever you can imagine but also the special kits for building monsters/fighters/etc. As with LEGO, I'm a big generic fan.

For finding me these sweet K'NEX battlemech sets. Screw christmas, I'm getting the Timberwolf (the *right* name for a madcat :) ) for myself.

-- iCEBaLM

"Almost every office and conference room at Lego contains a bowl of loose Lego bricks so that people can play during meetings."
Seems like a precursor to the ad agency and dot-com concept for stimulating creativity while reducing stress. Wish my company did this. :)

On another note, Lincoln Logs were created much earlier than Legos and have also fallen out of the marketplace. What a shame. :/

If only he knew the power of the dark side.

3prong

Even better than the above, Lego Buckyballs are new this year! (And you thought you'd need to resort to K'nex for a properly rendered buckyball!)