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Move Over Lego, Enter Atollo
FortKnox writes: "Through the blessed portal memepool, I stumbled across the new arcitecture toy, Atollo. These new building toys can build any type of shape with only two pieces. The two pieces can be connected in many different ways allowing both rigid and flexible connections. " MMmm. Toys. Anyone else remember Construx? I loved those things too.
Connex? No way... it's all about the tinkertoys.
aw yeah...
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Until then, Legos still rule the roost
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
Can it compete with Mindstorm?
(Can't tell....site slashdotted....must refresh till wee hours of night.....mmmmmm.....fresh dognuts.....)
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Anyone else remember Construx?
Somewhere, probably still in my parent's attic, I have a huge box full of Construx. When I was a kid I made little carts and buggies, hooked them to my Chihuahua, and made him pull them around the house. Great fun, that Chihuahua was...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Lego my Atollo.
"We will treat Osama Bin Laden to a spookydisharmoniousconflicthellride he will never forget," said Defense Secretary Wesley Willis in a televised press conference this morning. "Rock over London, rock on Kabul. Sprite. Obey your thirst."
All these new fangled toys.. kids have it nice today. When I was young, I had to build my own computer out of a pile of sand and some scrap metal!
Anyway it's always nice to see toys whose instructions don't consist of "Attach the Cockpit module to the Wing module. Your new F-16 model is now complete! Enjoy!".
News for Nerds. Stuff you can never get to.
Maybe I'll get through in a week.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
loved it. What about robotix? That stuff was really damned cool. You could build all sorts of mechanical things that would do stuff. My friends and I used to have wars where we'd build stuff with different brands and then war it out. construx usually always won.
Man, back to the good old days. Anyone else remember some others? I can't remember them all. I remember one that actually had screws and metal bars that you could bolt together in all different shapes and sizes, and motors too, but I can't remember the name of it.
If God gave us curiosity
I'm not banking on the massive success of this...
For one, half of the fun of Legos was all of the different pieces. If you just have two pieces, your creativity is impaired.
Besides, all of the different pieces keep kids buying more and going back to the store, which bodes well for the future of the company creating said parts.
*sigh* I miss construx. The difference in construction abilities between construx and legos was cool. You could construct different sorts of items with different attributes in each set. And both had mechanical/motorized/lit up capabilities.
What happened to them, anyways?
Gentoo Sucks
Anyone remember Spacewarp? You could build rollercoasters with plastic tubing and ball bearings? Anyone know if you can still buy Spacewarp? I'd love to buy one!
I have a large collection and I play with them every now and then. I have a working gatling gun that I made with Construx.
I wish there had been something like Mindstorms with Construx. I'd be able to do tons of cool stuff with that...
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
Don't forget, Atollo is lego compatible. So you can have your dodecahedrons and robotize them too.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
only if you got the money, to get money you need to be exploited or exploit someone else.
I am a big kid so i still play with Lego. It appears as though atollo.com was slashdotted though, so a quick google search found this link:
0 0a.htm
http://kidscience.about.com/library/weekly/aa1110
Enjoy!
I loved LEGO as a kid. I spent countless hours making computers, houses, all manner of gun, and, of course, the ubiquitous robot.
Now that I have kids of my own, they play with LEGO, and I don't even recognize the toys I grew up with.
I mean, sure, it's cool to have the Star Wars sets and what not, and the little lego men look really cool and all, but where's the creativity? Unless you have serious cash to drop on the Mindstorms, the sets are so specialized that you can only make one thing out of them.
I think that Atollo is a paradigm shift in construction-based toys, returning the focus to the user's creativity, rather than ability to follow diagrams in an instruction book.
Ahh.. Construx... That stuff was fun. I remember looking through the little booklets that came with the sets and seeing that you could buy sets with enough parts to build huge bridges and the like. Construx was cool in that the stuff you made was very rigid, so dune buggies didn't shatter when they flew off the curb... :)
SIGFEH
i loved your mom as a kid.
Construx was a lot of fun, actually. I still cherish a box of it somewhere back in a closet. I especially liked the fact you could easily build bigger structures with it than with lego... And of course you could have a nice motor with it and build a robot.
she loved it when i payed her for sex.
kind of like people prostitute their labor under capitalism. are you a wage whore?
i want to be free to live my life without having to worry about what im going to eat the next day.
I always liked Construx a lot more than Legos when I was younger, and still have a huge box of parts in the closet. The only problem was that (at least where I lived), it was almost impossible to find the kits and stuff in stores.
#include <sig.h>
Personally I think the reason why Legos remain the king of building toys is because they appealed to both kids who enjoy technical stuff as well as kids who just want to play. Toys like connex, capsela, robotix and even erector sets always seemed to appeal to more technical kids (like myself), and Atollo seems to be stuck in that same market. These toys may require more technical thinking, or dexterity than the average child may have. On a side note, is anyone else bothered by Lego's apparent need to make 200x the custom, one use only, decorative pieces? I bought the latest super car (8448) and have to order the silver champion only because I have an addiction, but I really don't like all these new pieces that are just for looks. It seems like their technic models are becoming less substantial.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
Ingenuity. Thats all you need. Construx was a great toy and it had no fancy AI programability or motors. It had glow in the dark, and boy was that fancy! Another great non-powered toy was kinex. It had some great plans for cars, the only thing was it had no motor. I spent my time with the large rubber band that came in the kit and made my own windup powered car. The only thing was that I would wind it up so tight that the plastic parts would snap. The best part was getting as much power out of the plastic before it would snap.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
A beowulf cluster of these!
lame, old timer jokes are now obligatory it seems...
Photos.
Right on... the glow in the dark features of contrux were awesome... I used to build body armor for myself as a kid with the snap on siding. Also Does anybody remember Capsella (I think thats how you spell it)??
Who makes you Sig?
I mean would want to make a wall out of those, much less anything fun.
My other sig is extremely clever...
To be perfectly honest, everyone has tried to capture what Lego has, and the harder they try the worse these toys get. Can I really see my 20 month old son having half a clue how to use these? Last night we opened a fresh new bucket of Duplos and he was putting near stuff together in no time. What am I supposed to do with these? Try to show him how the @#$@ing ball bearing fits in the socket!?
Not so with Legos. Legos are rectangular (an easy shape for kids to understand), they fit together one way (no bending shit backwards to make a wheel or something equally stupid), they go together easily and stay, and they teach kids things such as spatial relationships and manual dexterity while allowing them to be creative. The last point is especially important because most other toys REQUIRE these skills BEFORE they can be used! You should have seen the smile on my son's face when he figured out how to put those Duplos together!
And hey, when he gets older and wants to create big toys to go along with his Lego toys, I'll get him some Constructs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I still have all of mine. Really, the best part of building anything with Construx was to see how much punishment it took to destroy it.
Dyolf Knip
Yeah, who needs electronic CPUs for mindstorm like projects, and why use chemical batteries? I want to see a fully mechanical robot that stores energy as gravitational potential.
This was one cool toy from the early 80's: Capsela. Had hours of fun making boats, tanks and cars, all from the same kit. Each item was a spherical module that could be attached to other modules such as motors, various gearing mechanisms, pumps, clutches....a really good variety of devices.
Now I wonder what happened to that kit that was under my bed?
BTW, I think I would have liked these much more as a child. Some people might think that Legos are better because they have more variety of pieces. I think the reverse is true: the reason I liked Legos as a child was because I figured out how to build things that were not drawn for me. I NEVER attempted to build the demonstrations they had pictured on the box. With these things, I would have been able to express even more creativity.
I think Legos were a significant contributer to my geek status: now I put together code in much the same way that I put Legos together. I enjoy building things that nobody has ever thought of.
Am I wrong trying to pass these values onto my niece? I think I would rather buy her geek things that stretch the mind rather than clothes or dolls, but then, am I just passing my values onto her?
I remember 12 or 13 years back when I got my first set of construx for christmas. I loved them, and the first night I had them, I had a fully functional working crane built. They were a blast.
:)
Anybody else remember building stuff like that? Or am I just wierd?
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
First off here's a link to the various cached pages at google Here Don't know how much of a help they'll be though...
   Legos were by far my favorite toy when I was a kid. The reason was because it was a fun challenge to see if you could make something with just 20 (or so) basic pieces (of course then there were the specialty legos which there are now a million and a half) But if these allow you to make any shape, what's the point? It takes all the challenge and imagination out of looking at that pile of disjunct legos on the floor and seeing what it could be: a Deluxe Super Moon Skimmer with missle ports... oh and a... It was fun cause it was hard and it took your imagination. I kinda pity the kids who grow up today (or didn't grow up) without legos. Those were the happy years (this is kind of ironic as I am only 20 but hey)
   Now I stare at a blank screen and a keyboard and see that quicksort function it could be =)
"Madness and Genius are separated solely by Degrees of Success." -Unknown
If you guys want to find great new or classic toys, check out Dr Toy's site. Written by a Dr that specializes in toys.
These are toys we are talking about here! /. ?
Come one people, you are not 9 years old anymore.
Why is this even here on
So now we have robots going around independent of conventional sources of energy for sustinence knocking everthing they see over so they can capture the gravitational potential
Think it wont happen just wait till *you* get knocked over by some contraption just so it can recharge
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
LEGO killed proper engineering education because of it's snap together nature, engineering and design doesn't work like that... you design an object which then fits together perfectly, but obviously LEGO always does that for you, hence poor design process, you miss a vital step.
/.'ters will back me up here.
Now Mechano was a proper practical set that actually made you think! Also very versatile, hopefully some of the old school
An Exclusive Kit will be available in Discovery Channel Stores in the US in November later this year !
Other Kits are becoming available at speciality stores/museums throughout the US and in Europe.
Hopefully the site will recover soon and you'll be able to check things out online.
By the way, these are the first two pieces, not the only two !
And thanks for all the "constructive" input !
-atollo-inventor
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
coming in at around just over 10 cents/piece.
It seems to me that lego some lego kits come it at upwards of 50 cents or more per piece.
Always was a rip off. Not that it's not fun.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I agree with you, these are lacking. They are lacking the same thing every other construction toy lacks. Simplicity. Sure there are only two pieces, but way too many ways to connect them.
The advantage of Lego is that it is SIMPLE. There may be a lot of different pieces, but conceptually they are all the same. You always connect them the exact same way. That is their appeal, you can sit down and put them together right away, starting to explore the construction and creativity involved immediately, instead of having to first explore the ways to put them together and how they interact. Lego is a classic. It is simple. Anybody can pick it up and make stuff.
So while this looks like it has possibilities, I don't see it replacing Lego, just like other things have yet to replace lego.
Now if just Lego would go back to the basics instead of doing all these specialized kits.
Perhaps they built their Web server out of some of their own toys?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
These are toys we are talking about here! /. ?
Come one people, you are not 9 years old anymore.
Why is this even here on
You have kids? Guess not. Personally, I want my kid to be able to enjoy all the stuff I did as a child. Sure, OOP is much more advanced than Legos, but the seeds were planted there...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ok, who thinks we should start a petition to get Fisher Price to start making these things again? I mean, my son will be old enough in a couple years here and I only have a small bucket full!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
A toy is not a toy unless you can take it into the bath tub with you....err... hopefully you are familiar with capsela lest you think I had some other sort of pseudo-submersible toy... er.. ah never mind...
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I wonder if these still aren't available somewhere and relatively cheaply.
These were absolutely great!
A friend built an 8 foot told humanoid construct. It didn't quite move a great deal, but it was fascinating at the time.
I myself constructed a small two foot electric chair. I took the aluminum from cans and took strips along the arm rests and legs to for conduction. Then later cut the leads from the lights and battery construx thingie. It was quite interesting... mom didn't agree. It was dismantled later to end her shouts.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
That would be cool.
You could start with 3d modelling in software, and end up with several manufacturers using cool designs that are a lot more affordable. And interoperable.
Development cost to manufacturers would be close to zero.
You would need lower critical mass for production. Each manufacturer has the advantage of the "installed base" of compatible manufacturers.
Such stuff would be a hell of a lot cheaper to get into a kid's hands. Which is good for the not-so-wealthy among them.
As I said in another post, these things require that the child already have deterity and spatial abilities. If the child is still developing (like a 3 year old) Legos are MUCH better. As an added bonus, she can play with them with her friends as they will most likely understand legos too. (If my 20 month old son can use Duplos, anyone can use Lego products.)
If you don't believe me on how much better Legos are, try going to Denny's sometime and asking for their ring building set to try out. You'll find that these more "technical" toys are extremely unsuited to young children and they will become bored with them very fast.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
According to this link this product is no longer for sale since nobody can actually get to the site... :)
Oh yeah! I completely forgot about these, until this little reminder! When I was younger, I had lots of 'em... lots. Probably only had a few in reality, but my memory says 'lots'. I just checked on ebay, and theres tons for sale... hmm... I need to build something now.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Would this be pronounced boring old "Ah-tole-oh" or exciting hispanic "A-toy-o"? =)
It's got "toy" right in the NAME, it has to be good! =)
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Apparently you'll be able to get kits in November at Discovery Channel Stores.
Or, I guess when the site recovers from being slashdotted....
Is it a man or a woman?
And I did some searching. Go search EBay and you can find a boatload of 'em!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Aren't you boys a little too fucking OLD to be playing with LEGO blocks? Jesus fucking christ!
(I guess you little geeks have already forgotten the events of a week ago. For shame.)
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
The name Atollo comes from the Latin word "atollo" which means to raise a building Hey, I love redunacy in servers... but damn.
Just recently I came across a toy with little rods with magnets at each end (edges) and ball bearings (verticies.) This looks great for playing around with polyhedrae, latices, etc. There were three disadvantages: It was pretty expensive for what it was, there is only one length of edge, and there is insufficient room for 12 edges to come from one vertex, which rules out some latices. Sorry, I can't remember the name of the toy.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The cool pieces like the laser dish with it's connecting struts and the curved shield pieces were lots of fun when I was a kid. They added the extra touch to the model that really made my model come alive! After all, what's a moonbase without lasers and forcefields? Besides, he was referring to how most of these other toys are much more of an approximation. Out of Legos I can create a starbase. Out of these... things... I can create a mish-mash of pieces that I CLAIM is a starbase. Good luck convincing anyone else.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
While my pre-school counterparts are prototyping their sloppy block worlds with legos... I was using my well designed fisher scientific tools and my father's ogranic chemistry stick-and-ball modeling set of map my perfect vision of the future.
...unfortunatly, I've found that a world raised on mediocrity interperts better designed ideas as arrogance.
...well fuck them and fuck the world that supports them.
Sorry the site is clogged, but none the less you can get kits at a few stores around the US, and soon at Discovery Channel Stores.
Some basic info for those that couldn't make it to the site... yet.
Yes there are initially only two pieces and the system is LEGO compatible.
The pieces are currently made in Scotland ! Yes, amazingly other things do come out of Scotland other than single malt !
One person nailed our intent on the head in an earlier message, we hope to introduce a new creative building system for all ages.
You can build anything from dinosaurs to geometric space structures !
Hope some of you manage to make it to the site,
and thanks for the "constructive" feedback.
Stupid lameness filter... *grumble*
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
We're not here to judge you, we're just here to provide support.
That was a toy... the old fashioned kinda toy where you used a screwdriver and if you chewed on the pieces you would either choke up screws or lacerate yourself. Those where the days....
- Jimbob
I'm personally somewhat younger, and my IQ, as if it matters anything, is somewhere in that range. And I agree wholeheartedly.
I grew up in such a way that everything looked like a building set to me. My favorite toys age 11-14 were solderless breadboard and 7400-series TTL logic. I've had virtually all the major building sets, Construx, Meccano, Robotix, Capsela, Lasy (that's a little obscure), used Lego considerably (my brother had some). I had a half-dozen Radio Shack lab kits. I've programmed since I was five.
Any parent thinking I'm a special case should reevaluate how they perceive their children. Intelligence is learned, during (generally) the first 6 years of life.
And is it any wonder I ended up in Engineering?
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Try playing with them like a six year old.
My six year old son spends a lot of time adding special equipment onto robots, planes, spaceships, cars, submarines, etc... An arm from a Bionicle makes a fine rocket engine. Did you know that if you put a propellor onto car, it can be a submarine, too?
Try connecting the "decorative pieces" in different ways. Notice how Lego uses just a few basic dimensions again and again. A Lego axle fits in the same size hole as a bump on the basic brick, as does the tip of the Lego pine tree and a gazillion other Lego parts. Likewise, many things are just the right size for a minifig's hands (claws).
If the instructions in the fancy sets blind you to the other ways to use the pieces, just buy the big blue tubs of basic bricks.
These guys should get together with the company that makes all those outdoor plastic playsets. Imagine the castles the kids could construct with sockets the size of a human femur.
I've got boxes of Lego and Construx at home sitting in the basement. Haven't opened the boxes in years, but I still remember using Super Glue to allow perfectly stable cross overs. :)
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Construx were the shit! I still have mine. I have the motors and lights sets.....they are so cool
Atolla sounds suspiciously like "Ayatolli". Is this a new tool of terror?
Atollo the hen
It's great, put stuff where you need it when you need it...no more trying to stretch ribbon cables as far as they'll go- just slap a new bay right next to the other one in 2 minutes. Those little plastic panels that fit in the middle of the rectangles are pretty much like regular bay covers anyway. There could be a whole new market for these babies. As far as construction toys go you can't forget about Lincoln Logs (going back a little further)
The problem with these building blocks is that they're not pretty. I can design something out of Lego bricks that ends up being aesthetically pleasing when i'm done. To get these things to be nice looking, you have to blur your eyes. Most of you geeks prolly don't give a damn about aestetics (look at your own computers, 90% of you) but they matter.
Anyway, a lot of things have tried to tackle the king of the heap, but I don't think Lego bricks will be coming down anytime soon.
When I was a kid, we had great fun with Fischertechnik, which we found out about through
a German friend of the family. It's kind of a
cross between Lego Technic and Meccano. There
site (yes, it's in German) is at http://www.fischertechnik.de/. Great stuff.
Was I the only one?
The pieces are currently made in Scotland ! Yes, amazingly other things do come out of Scotland other than single malt !
mmm scotsmen
They always did have very poor distribution. There was only one store where it could be found in my town (and never at a Toys R Us). But now they're sold on the web (ramagon.com).
I just took a look at the Atollo and they remind me of Zaks...except with Zaks there were 2 or 3 diffi pieces...Square and triangle pieces, they just snapped together...
looks like the same basic idea, could the Atollo be a new evolved type of Zaks?
http://www.rokenbok.com
a cross between lego and remote control stuff.
Might be a bit for the younger kids (ie it's not MindStorm), I don't really know yet (because it seems a bit expensive and I haven't bought any for my kid yet). But my 5 year old is dying for it.
Atollo Khameinei!
I haven't seen them myself, but they also have some robotic kits which can be controlled from a computer. http://www.lasy.com/products/robot.html
Lego is all very well and good, but it doesn't beat Meccano. You've gotta love something you can build a working orrery or a working vending machine out of.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
making robots like this using 2 pieces. LEGO rules.
JP.
--- Worst tagline ever.
this -> http://jp.dnsalias.net:8080 using 2 different parts.
JP
--- Worst tagline ever.
Construx, You Build, the Alien, the Airforce! ahh the good old days :p
I used to make crossbow like weapons out of constructs. I'd use the long rods from the erector set I had (normally used for axles in vehicles) and used it as a guide for the little blue connector thingies. The rod was just the right size for the blue thingies to slide down it. Take a bunch of rubber bands and you got a nice little "toy" to bug your sister with. hehe.
-Chris
Capsella kicked ass. Before their was aibo ther was capo. Oh he wasn't a smart dog. Damn thing had wacky legs, and couldn't stop walking, but those were the days.
Robert A Heinlein had a 3-bit computer in Number of the Beast at one point. It was only briefly mentioned that it used trinary logic rather than binary, and I believe it was based on 3-phase A/C power, rather than the DC that computers are now based on.
As for why a trinary computer would be better, consider it analagous to why a language with 10 words is better than one with only 4. You can say a lot more things in a lot less space. Of course, how this would actually be accomplished is very hard for us to envision, as we are so used to the binary logic of true and false, on and off. Kudos to the guy that can actually wrap his head around it.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
apparently all you people missed out on the fun of zaks. i was the only one i knew who played with them, and they beat the crap out of legos. the could move, for one thing. plus they were lego compatible.
Heck, I'm 18 years old and I'm gonna check these guys out.
You only want them because they talk about nodes. (A "node" is an entry in E2, and anotherone is one of the E2 editors.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
The site boasts that the peices are lego compatible, that's pretty cool!
When I was a kid I had something called Meccano. Was that the same you were thinking of? This had loads of metal girders, and metal plates with holes in every half inch or so. Girders were green plates where red (that was in the mid fifties - I think later versions had yellow girders and black plates). Small nuts and bolts where used to join it all together.
I used to build cranes with it, and had an electric motor and loads of gears. Careful engineering of the gearbox would allow you to
a) Drive cabin rotation around the main mast
Had a special piece which was two wheels with a ball race in between. One of the pieces had a sproketed outside which would take a chain. This was bolted to the girder structure that made the crane tower, the other half to the cabin bottom. An axel throught the cabin bottom with a small sproketted wheel would then have a chain round the gear bolted to the crane tower and you could make the cabin rotate.
b) Lift the jib up and down, AND
c) Lift the hook up and down
I seem to remember making a gear box with a gear on a movable axel that you could make move back and forth with a lever. Dependent on which gear engaged you could either drive the jib or the hook. Worm gears where used to slow down the motor to a sensible speed.
Another lever allowed you to control the motor (forward, stop, reverse).
We bought all this stuff and it came in cardboard boxes. My father built a wooden cabinet with special dividers to keep it all in.
Won't beat lego
Segmentation fault.
I'm sorry, but LEGO blocks are much more sturdy (especially with epoxy). These things are nice toys, but suck for prototyping anything.
I see people have mentioned Capsella, tinkertoys, lincoln logs, erector sets and construx, but there's a couple more I'd want to still be able to get.
One was a simple building set made basically of black girders with vertical and horizontal pieces. Sticking a vertical piece into the top of another vertical piece anchored up to 4 horizontal pieces held between the two. The set was for building skyscrapers, and man could it back that up. I suppose you can use construx ok for it, but it made pretty nice looking skyscrapers, even had office building like window panels to complete the look. Specialized, but neat stuff.
The other one was an absolutely fascinating system primarily using little cubes where each side of the cube had a peg or a hole so you could lock the cubes together. But the cube also had a side or two that was hinged and could "open" up. so yu could build hinged/mechanical things (open a lot of the cubes and you could make flexible, snake constructions, things with arms, etc.). Add a few triangular and other random pieces and it was a reallyodd but neat set. Anyone remember this? I'd love to hear the name, as I inherited it from my brother and have never seen it for sale.
Is anyone else stockpiling toys so that their children can actually have something quality to play with? Modern toys are awful and getting worse. If these children are the future, we're in deep shit.
That's what I read at the first glimpse of their home page...
Tuff that Smatters.
If you like construktion games and aren't allowed to bring the Legos to your cubicle, try the Sodaconstructor.
It is a lovely toy that let's you build walkers etc. out of springs.
If all you care about is shape, clay is a lot more creative. If you care about function, both Lego and Atollo seem pretty boring to me. Bring back ErectorSet or give FischerTechnik a try--that's a much nicer engineering construction set.
Looks real nice, and minimalist. Can I buy a kit from France ?
Cheers,
--fred
Inspired by their web site copy...
Once the ball is in the socket
There are many ways to rotate the brokit
In these two examples the brokit is locked
Safe in the neighbouring socket slot
Rotating a brik by 90 degrees,
Joining two brokits becomes a breeze.
Join them up, socket to socket,
This is the way to make columns of brokits.
(Hinges will also fit back to back,
To create a double socket stack)
-----
Atollo looks fun, and the regular polyhedrons would amuse a few people at my next roleplaying session.
But for younger children, I think Lego is still a better boost to their creativity.
For example: when a child is first given a crayon, and some paper, he'll play with it for a while. He'll discover that when he strikes the paper with the crayon, it leaves a mark. He sees a cause-and-effect and, curious, he repeats it.
For some time, he will make random, meaningless markings, but, at some point he will draw two dots, with a line underneath, and suddenly recognise it as a face. This is hugely important to our developement, as it develops the concepts of abstraction and represention of objects and ideas.
Herein lie the basis for writing, art, architecture, orthography, etc. The child will develop this, by drawing new faces, adding heads, limbs and whatnot, emerging with the stick-people we're all familiar with.
Now with lego, you push a few pieces on top of each other, and, hey presto, it's a wall. Put a few walls together, and you have a building.
The problem with K'nex, Atollo, and the like, is that it's harder to make that connection, because of all the gaps, hinges, and stickly bits.
So I say, start a kid off with Lego, and once they start getting comfortable with that, throw the other systems at them too.
I can't help thinking that the Atollo stuff will be picked up by chemists and biologists, much like Mindstorm is picked up by robotics people.
Incidentally, the behaviour I mentioned about children and crayons, is played out the exact same way with Chimpanzees. The thing is, the chimpanzee never seems to recognise the face, and never progress from there.
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
Scotland is also home to the deep fried mars bar.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of lame old-timer jokes?
Drifting back to the topic...
My favourite short-lived lego-competitor was called Capsella - anyone else remember that one?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Constructs rocked. Especially when you had pacifist parents that wouldn't allow Trasformers and toy guns in the house. No problem...build your own.
AS a child, the toy store near me sold 'tente', a spansih version of legos that specialized in spaceships. these things were way cool.
Hey, don't forget about IRN-BRU!
The toys are neat, but I fear for anything that doesn't have pointy bits that look like guns. What good is making a model star ship if I can't arm it to the teeth? Mass destruction, that's what sells toys.
The minimalist approach is also really nifty in a geek sort of way, but is it going to be a marketing hit? Even Lego seems to have lost the "generic block" approach and has gone over to making very specific pieces. Presumably this is because they can sell 10 times the number of "Bionicle" kits if you need the unique parts to make each model.
When is Atollo going to be available in my kids' Happy Meals? :-)
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Do these new blocks hurt just as much as those Lego 1x1s when you step on a floorfull of them in the dark? **ouch**
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
For all these "alternative" construction toys, nothing has ever beat LEGO. I don't think that it's necessarily because LEGO has a head-start, although that's sure an advantage for them. No, I think LEGO has the simplicity factor nailed down better than anyone else.
I mean, come on. BRICKS. How much simpler can you get than a plain rectangular prism, except for the alphabet cubes everyone gets as babies? You stack them, they get taller, and its easy to visualize how several of them combine. Right angles and multiple planes and voila, you have a house. A little more creativity, and you have a car or a plane. And so on.
The sets get more "multidimensional" as you progress, but that's the beauty of LEGO. They can stay simple or get increasingly complicated depending on your preferences. At one end, you have Duplo bricks; at the other, Technic Star Wars droids that you can program with MindStorms. LEGO is only as complicated as you want.
Every other type of construction set, however, seems to promote flexibility at the expense of simplicity. Sure I can use these two pieces to build (supposedly) anything I want, but I can't really visualize how that's supposed to work. And I'm a grown adult with a talent for abstract visualization; how's a child supposed to accomplish it? Once you've built everything in the booklet you're given, you're left to your own imagination, and with these pieces I don't have any.
I'm convinced that many of these "alternate" construction sets are purchased by teenagers and adults, people who like construction and who want to "wow" their friends and family with elaborate creations. They're supposed to be sold to children, but they don't have the visualization skills to make a dinosaur or a Formula-1 racecar with them. All they really want, upon opening the package, is to be able to build a house.
It looks a LOT like 'Zoob', but with a better idea for a hinge/crosspiece, and with the lego compatability. My friends who run Waltham, MA's all-construction-toy The Construction Site haven't heard of it yet, but knowing them, they probably will have it in stock as soon as it's available to general retailers.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
capsella was the best!!!
The ball joint is lifted from 70's lego Technology. If you ever had the larger lego people with hats and bendable arms, then you know what I mean. The ball joint reminds me of their head joint.
One of the pieces is called a "brokit". I'd think if you couldn't come up with a more creative name that you'd opt for "fixit" or "bildit" or something rather than "brokit". Now whaddaya say when your little brother trashes your creation?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
hey, Scotland is also where you get IRN BRU - the most virulent, awesome soft drink ever.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Hey, any freebees to the guy that brought atollo the attention it deserves??? ;-)
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Atollo Mindstorms!
Technoli
I sing that song about my ex-gf now
;)
Green Day rocks
Ah, the old "nowadays Lego has too many specialized pieces" complaint. In a few cases justified, but doesn't anybody remember what their early Lego creations looked like? I'll answer that: "crap". Yes, they looked like crap. The basic rectangular bricks are versatile, but if you are trying to make more sophisticated creations or "model-quality" recreations of actual vehicles or buildings, they're not sufficient. Even as a kid I *loved* all the specialized pieces, because without them you couldn't build a Cylon raider or an X-wing fighter or a dump truck that actually dumped. If you're still unconvinced see Brickshelf to see how creative one can be with the "single-use" parts.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD remember. Why did you ignore it? it's clearly one of the most successful desktop UNIXes right now, and with 10.1 about to come out, it will see even more widespread adoption.
Maybe you ignored it because IT BLOWS A BIG GIANT HOLE THROUGH YOUR WEAK ARGUEMENT!
http://home14.inet.tele.dk/rolighed/
$25 for a 240 piece set? I've always been a fan of legos, but they were always really expensive. I think at this price, I could buy more Atollo than I'd ever need for fifty bucks.
My lego collection has to be at least a couple hundred dollars worth...
Hot Soup - Lethal Doses
I've always loved this kind of thing, from Lincoln Logs to the old erector sets with the metal girders that you could slice your fingers open with.
Another one in that market that most people don't know about is ZomeTools. I've used these things to model molecules, build small pieces of furniture, explain 4d geometry, and decorate my party spaces with cool sculpture.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I don't know, the thing that made Legos so much fun while I was growing up was/is their simplicity. This block snaps to that block and that's it. You had to use your imagination to build from very simple, standard shapes, something complex and neat. Plus, has anyone considered the relatively cheap quality of these parts? These things and the other stuff like them seem flimsy to me. I built a stepladder with my Legos and they keep on goin. These things are so complicated you'd have to be a middle aged geek to get anything out of them anyways. I'll never trade in my Legos...
The following has now been posted on their front page:
"20th September 2001
Due to unprecedented demand from the posting on www.slashdot.org our systems have been inundated with orders and enquiries. We are a relatively small company with limited resources, but we will endeavor to satisfy the demand ! And we are very encouraged by the feedback and response to ATOLLO, thank you."
"The victory of arms leaves the issues where they were." Chomsky
it is great! Wow. This seems like it would make those science projects when we were kids where we used styrofoam balls and toothpicks really really elementary (ba dum dum). They look awesome! With just two pieces though, it seems like it would be really complicated for just a kid to make something. Though it also seems like it would be an easy way to sit there with pieces and just come up with something. To make the geometric shapes like on their site would require lots of pre-planning...
:)
But they're LEGO COMPATIBLE!! werd b00ty. The combinations are limitless...
I'm gonna go buy some this weekend and see what they'll do with mindstorms
-lisa
These would make a good desktop toy for the office. Just have a bowl with a couple hundred of these guys in it. Great ice-breaker too... like a geeks way of bonding.
construx were great, i still use mine
send mail to info@atollo.com,
prove your fort knox,
and we'll get some to you.
Just 'cos I e-mailed them to ask about UK availability, they sent me the 24-piece Acrobot set! I've played with it some, and it's really clever; all those degrees of freedom make Lego look dull.
Having only two pieces is like assembly language all over again. Guess I have the xmas presents for f&f sorted now...