Slashdot Mirror
Classic Toys For Christmas?
waterwheel asks: "Christmas is coming, and it's time to start planning our online shopping list for future Slashdot readers. This year I'm having a look at some of the more classic toys - and am finding that not only are some of the classic toys still around - but they are still educational and fun. Two good examples of this are the Rubik's Cube and the time honored gyroscope. The cube has been around for about 20 years, the gyroscope it seems for almost a 100. Both will be under the tree this year. Both of these toys are able to compete with video games - a true test of staying power. This begs the question - what other classic toys do you remember from your youth that are still fun enough that kids will play with them today?"
Now I know what's under the Christmas tree! Not to hurt your feelings, but I really do like the video games. When you're not looking, I'll just move the stickers on the Rubik's Cube.
Oh, and mom hates it when you use "begs the question" on Slashdot. It just starts a whole "that's not the meaning" discussion that no one cares about.
Sigs cause cancer.
Anyone remember this game. The motto was "unlink the rings", I've been looking for one for about a decade, I can never seem to find a "good" one on ebay :/
God Bless America.
Nuff Said
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
I remember playing with legos, and still see them on the market today.
BAN BPL! Keep the radio spectrum free fro
What other classic toys do you remember from your youth that are still fun enough that kids will play with them today?
Firearms.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
Need I say more?
How about the american standard....baseball and glove?
Whatever happend to the yo-yo? big fad than dropped off.
[plug] I have a self-updating toys page generated from Amazon with their new and sale toy items. [/plug]
From the list, some of the retro items are: Tonka Trucks, Rubiks Cube, Teenage Mutant Ninja Vehicle Truck, Nerf footballs, WWE Classic Superstars, etc...
LightBright Pwns.
My Blog
The slinky was one of my favorite toys growing up.
Also, the superball was awesome as well. I usually could be found with a superball in my pocket all the time and would be constantly bouncing it off walls, annoying my parents and everyone around me in the process!!! LOL, good times.
rock'em sock'em robots.
This doesn't beg the question, it raises the question. See here.
Firecrackers.
You have to love Legos. Not only are they fun, but they teach creativity, mechanical engineering, and design. If you are playing with someone else, they teach teamwork and sharing. Not to mention you can build some cool guns and spaceships.
On this topic, I'm not a big fan of the premade Lego sets for Star Wars or Harry Potter or whatever. Kids need the generic box of bricks and plates.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Cookie Counter taught me basic arithmetic when I was in kindergarten.
does a commodore 64 qualify? I mean, you can emulate :) - that was my best childhood toy - I saw it (wrapped - but i peeked) sitting in the closet---thought I'd be able to "talk to it" (as in have a conversation, you know, like on Tron!).
and Big Wheels. My youth in a very short sentence.
I loved Legos. I never got the fancy themed ones, just made due with the basic sets. Made a tie fighter out of a service station set, and eventually managed to cobble together enough odd ball colored pieces to build the Galactica and a couple of BSG fighters. Legos are timeless.
duh...
...classic toys are better! That's why I asked Santa for an FPGA System-On-a-Chip for Christmas! :-D
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ignore all that fancy "Harry Potter" type themed Legos that are 3 times the price of basic blocks. You can buy a huge tub of basic Lego for around 20 bucks at Toys R Us or any Lego Store.
You can get a MASSIVE amount of plain lego that's great for stimulating a kid's imagination at a fraction of the cost of some of that "themed" Lego junk.
If that's not "creative" enough, find some Technics Lego. That stuff is neat to play with, too!
I've got a PhD in Mechanical Engineering - I can't do it, I can't stand it.
Sure there's a bunch of steps you can follow, but where's the challenge in that.
I can only stand in awe of anyone who independently is able to solve the Rubic's Cube.
...will be getting some lincoln logs this year. He's already way ahead of the game thanks to educational TV, electronics, and two voracious readers as parents, so we're looking to give him something to inspire good old fasioned fine motor skills and 3d perception..
I never liked those big fat legos-- I'll wait until he can manipulate the "real" ones before I get him into legos...
This game entertained me well into High School for no apparent reason. There's really no skill to it, but trash talk and rematches kept it going for hours on end.
What a fantastic game. Blended the best between mindless destruction and strategic annihilation. You can still get copies off eBay.
Don't know if it's still around, but It was one of my favs!
Nothing like trying to draw a circle on that sucker.
"That's not ironic, it's just mean!" - Bender
I played with these every chance I got when I was a kid. And now my own kids can make literally anything out of legos. Currently their favorite creations are Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I'll go with Fridgets. I don't know if they're considered "classic" in terms of age (I'd never seen them before a few years ago), but I think of them as "classic" in the sense that they're simple, creative, low-tech and a lot of fun to play with. And all the rug-rats in my neighborhood love 'em.
Depending on the age of your kid but as far as my 2 yr old is concerned, he still enjoys the big empty cardboard boxes. You can make castles, tunnels, houses.. And I like it this way ;)
esilva
Not the plastic tipped ones either...
Give the kid the box. He'll make a fort and have hours of fun, and you get yours too.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
Still hard to beat.
Low threshold, no ceiling.
Go old school and just build, or get a Mindstorms kit and you can use all your existing LEGO and add anything else to it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
That's it, I'm leaving you negative feedback.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
I mean really, how many times can your re-wrap the string, yank it and hold it in your palm (i'm talking 'bout the gyroscope you perv)?
I'd rather have something that makes use of the stupid gyroscope. Where are all of the fun toys that use the gyroscope? Where's the home segway kit? Why doesn't someone make more toys that USE these classic toys instead of leaving someone uninspired and wanting more?
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Because, at least with my kids, the end in the huge box along with the other sets and are re-used with their own creations.
I've always just bought the packaged sets. I kinda wish they had those when I was a kid.
I have been on the lookout for several years for a robust version of the classic Drinking Bird I remember seeing as a kid in the '60s -- http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/product/1169 -- but every version I've found lately is made of incredibly fragile, thin glass too easily breakable; the pivoting mechanism hangs and (metaphorically) sputters as the thing tries to work.
What this country needs is a good $10 Drinking Bird!
nn
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
I wonder how they even remotely thought those things were safe. Lots of fun, though.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
"The cube has been around for about 20 years"
Actually, the cube has been around exactly 30 years (this year)...i have one sitting in my cube (no pun intended) as we speak...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
I still have a box somewhere that I'll pull out for my kids when I have 'em. I would follow practice of building the intentioned model and then figuring what similar things I could make followed by something with no resemblance and then followed by something completely different with no resemblance. After that stage, the blocks joined the pile. I remember building bridges that spanned my living room and at one point I think I built a Ghostbusters pack, though that may have been with Constructs.
I still have the RotJ Endor speeder bike that I built (about 6" long) on my desk at home.
Man, I can't wait 'til I get to see what my kids will create.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
-Phixxr
ungggghhhh
Girls
Oh wait, I'm on slashdot... nevermind.
Tinkertoys - I got one of my creations published in the Tinkertoy magazine.
Lego - the rectangular block kind. None of this Star Wars/Pirate/Bionicle nonsense.
Anything else that fosters imaginative thinking: PlayDoh, Etch-a-sketch, and the like.
When my family moved to the United States the first toy my parents bought me and my brother were a set of *metal* Tonka Trucks! Those things were industructable! We would smash them, throw them, hit them with hammers, basically do kid things with them. And those trucks still held on...
It's a physics device: four squares attached to a vane in a bulb of glass rotate when placed in the sun. I still have it with me in my college dorm room on a window sill.
If your child likes science it's a neat little gift. :)
I usually just play with the box.
And if it has a cellophane front, that's a bonus.
Talk about staying power. Yo-yo!
Damn hard to find, but kick Lego's ass anyday
http://www.discoverthis.com/capsela.html
I think those robot wars TV shows were based on this....
pr0n.
I spent many, many hours playing with Matchbox Cars. They were cheaper than Hot Wheels, and less prone to problems if you played with them outside in the dirt.
Master Mind & Nintendo's original DS Oil Panic http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&c ategory=2541&item=8145086019&rd=1&tc=photo
Yoyos are cool. I enjoyed them a lot, and I think kids could still like'em.
Nothing beats a good set of Jarts...
It's not a classic, but the Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 is a fun toy for younger children, and surprisingly for a lot of older girls (13-18) as well. Just straddle the broom's comfortable girth, activate the magic vibrating switch, and away you go for blissful sessions (about 15-35 minutes, varies) of fantasy fun!
remote control cars. boats too. or a kit for building them. or even just model kits and a model paint set. they are definately a classic.
:) Sure, 18 years ago rechargeable didn't hold their charge very long in remote control cars, but they were still neat.
add some rechargeable batteries too. I loved having rechargeable batteries as an 8 year old. I thought they were the coolest things
Microsoft Bob
im buying my kids handguns.
Can't..... resist..... desire... too... strong
When i was a kid all i got for christmas was a lump of coal and a kick up the arse. Then for dinner our mother and our father would kill us with a breadknife and dance on our graves singing Hallelujah.
You tell that to kids today and they won't believe you
Easy enough for a kid to learn, but strategies are so varied, it's hard to ever master it against another good player...
As an aside, I loved throwing a few Major and Colonels at the front with all my scouts and a couple of Miners and decimating my opponents' lower ranks... that gambit usually only works once or twice on them... unless they're slow to adapt.
'nuff said.
t orset.htm
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/erec
Estes Rockets, Legos, Lincoln Logs, Slinkys, Frisbees. There were model airplanes with gas engines that were guided by a string when I was a kid. Are those still available or has rc become so cheap that those are not worth it anymore?
FreeSpeech.org
I don't know if ou can still get them, I haven't seem them around for a while, but I absolutely loved my erector set. And now I'm an engineer....coincidence?
A totally frustrating toy, until you learned to rip it open with a screwdriver and reassemble the pieces into some semblance of order. The best was when other, sympathetic relatives bought you the 'how to do the Rubik's Cube' book, where you were immediately buried under a pile of obscure, set theory-like math, which only PROVED that you were a moron.
No, don't get your kid a Rubik's Cube.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Put me in a room with Legos to this day and you know what? I'm gonna play.
The Classic Football handheld. Fun, cheap, nostalgic.
My first "programmable" toy.
LEGO! I always got LEGO for christmas, and I loved it - and I bet the kids today also love LEGO.
:) (this can be a great gift for adults too.. :)
A tip: Buy the LEGO robot invention kit, and let the kids teach themselves both basics of engineering and programming while having lots of fun!
My favorite toys were the Slinky, Tinker-Toys, and the Erector Set.
Slinky: Not as creative of a toy as the latter two, but very hypnotizing. Also very fun outdoors in urban environments with really, really long stairwells. (Urban environments would probably require more parental supervision.)
Tinkertoy: Real creative toys made from wood.
Erector Set: While this has the most potential for creative play, you really need to have patience and attention to make anything happen. If you have a child with these qualities, and the motor skills to handle all the small parts, definately a winner.
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
Source: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Lego
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
Something tells me that little Timmy is going to be a little disappointed if he gets a Gyroscope instead of Halo II.
Board games will always be popular. They're also good for bringing a family together in something you can all enjoy.
Make some popcorn, break out Monopoly/Life/Candy land on a Tuesday night and see how hard it is to pry the Kids away from the Television. Normally the smell alone will do it.
Got older kids? Play Risk. Everyone loves a 9 hour game of Risk.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Whatever happened to Lego Technics (sp?)? I believe the "Mindstorm" Lego sets come with gears, axles, actuators and such, but can you buy non-Mindstorm technic sets still? I used to have the most fun with those.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
LEGO is a great toy except it costs a friggin' mint these days. The old style stuff that was all blocks and some smaller specialty pieces is the best. The stuff today is too specific for many different projects. So I guess I am recommending LEGO from 15 years ago.
When I was kid I had Mecano, which was like Lego, except it used little nuts and bolts and pieces of thin sheet metal. I could make a car with it. It was really cool. Is that still available?
A Red Ryder BB Gun.
It does not beg the question
that thing with the cup on top of the stick with the ball attached to a string. the purpose was to get the ball into the cup. that was really fun. so was the paddle ball thing,..you know with the rubber ball attached to the elastic string.
::leon::
I just ordered a copy of School House Rock for my kids...er ... me.
I am also looking at the multi purpose electronics kits and an erector set for my oldest daughter.
I can't seem to get enough of the older toys and neither can my kids. They are so tired of plastic.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Lawn Darts
What other classic toys do you remember from your youth that are still fun enough that kids will play with them today?
Coal. You insensitive clod.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
"Both of these toys are able to compete with video games - a true test of staying power." I don't think so. A Rubik's cube - maybe, but not for long. And a Gyroscope? No way can that hang tough with a video game. If you give a kid a Gryoscope and have him in the same county as a PS2, he'll play with the Gryoscope until he realizes that it only does one thing, then move on to the video games.
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
Coincidently, Tom Hank's Christmas movie (why not, he's done everything else) - the Polar Express opened Wed. Lionel got the in on the act, and they have the official toy for the movie and are expecting to double their best year in the last 20. They are probably right.
Electric trains are still fun, I still remember the one I had at age 5.
My impression from the article is that the author refers to classic as the convetional toys that you would get in an independent toy store.
Personally, I think a "classic" toy from my IT standpoint is the first NES.
I still play it, the kids love it, house guests love it.
The gameplay is entertaining, the strategy is not overly complex, and the graphics are endearing.
Games that the kids love? RiverCityRansom, DuckHunt, WWF Wrestlemania, World Cup Soccer, etc.
Really. I wouldn't have any problems with buying this "classic" toy for other kids.
Now all I have to do is to figure out a way to start it up without blowing on the cartridge; inserting it in to the game system like I'm Indiana Jones, switching a bag of sand for a statue; and pushing the Power button in various manners.
Also interesting and undermentioned is Erector sets. They aren't as easy to configre as Capsella, but certainly give you more freedom to do what you want. I got some good milage out of those as a kid.
Lego is already mentioned a billion times, but I'd recommend the old school bricks as opposed to the recent specialty bricks that aren't nearly as configurable.
Tinker Toys and Construx were good fun, though I haven't seen either around recently. I also haven't really looked.
If you have aspiring artists consider some honest to god nice drawing pencils, some high quality paper, and a good eraser. There's about an endless number of things one can draw.
Board games are up on my list too. Consider a nice chess set if there isn't one around the house. That's a game that's stood the test of time.
If not now, when?
Kids today are so spoiled they don't deserve a Commodore 64. Get them a Sinclair Spectrum. or a Commodore VIC-20.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I don't remember how long it took me to solve the Missing Link puzzle, but I remember finding a pattern that would solve it if I just kept repeating the same moves over & over again-- I actually started keeping track at one point, and discovered that it never took more than 70 iterations of the pattern to solve it.
:)
The Pyraminx I bought in an airport shop in Frankfurt when I was 13 years old, right before we left to return to the states. I had it solved (again, with a repeatable pattern that solved it if I just kept repeating it) before we landed in New York.
Both were great fun, though
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
I loved my big Meccano kit.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
So Johnny, what do you want Santa to bring you this year? A super cool retro GYROSCOPE?!?!?!?!?!?! Or that new game thing... you know, the Nintendo... ohh... what was it, "DS"? *Johnny kicks Santa in the shin*
Now, *that's* what I call a classic toy!
what other classic toys do you remember from your youth that are still fun enough that kids will play with them today?
Power outlets, broken glass and matches.
They were great. You could use them to make all kinds of things like cabins and err... more cabins. I love Lincoln Logs. They really spark the imagination.
If you like Legos, this would be a good year to include Lego on your shoppng list. Sales for Lego have fallen over 25% in the last two years and the company is looking at a record setting loss for this year.
Well I have a list here
Legos (My girls have my old legos plus new ones we Bought)
Hot Wheels
Wooden Blocks
Lincon Logs
Tinker Toys
Little People are still out there although changed quite a bit
Barbie Dolls (They are girls, it can't be avoided)
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Still, IMHO, the all-time classic. Digging around in my grandfather's basement I even came across a set that my uncles had used as kids, so (I even got permission) I added the parts to my own collection. If you think Legos let you build great stuff, you've never used an Erector set to put together a meter-high four-legged walker -- and that was forty years ago.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
A bicycle?
A tree house?
Legos.
Lincon Logs.
Estes Model rockets.
Cox Control line airplanes.
Any of the new RC airplanes.
Rubber band powered planes.
Swing set and slide?
Anything to get them out of the house and moving in the sun shine and fresh are and not sitting in front of the TV/Monitor.
I have to say that toys that invole the real world beat the heck heck out of video games. I have to wonder what we are teaching our kids. Even the coolest Slashdot stories tend to involve things like making your own roller coaster in your backyard. A battle meck tree house. Or a full scale space ship in your back yard. Not sitting in front of Doom3 day after day.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I cant be the only one who was addicted to this game for at least a week, and the baseball one too.l assic_ Football_2_Electronic_Hand-Held_Game__iMA43567.htm l
http://www.areyougame.com/interact/Mattel_C
I used to thing this game was amazing, I was in a target a while ago and so they had re-released it, so I picked it up, thinking oh, this is so cool and retro, I'll get it, I played it again and couldn't do it, it was the lamest thing I had ever seen, I couldn't believe this was hours of entertainment, 20 + years ago.
My favorite Xmas toy. But, I would guess that the PC police has outlawed this. Way too much fun if you are nerdy. Hey, you even get chlorine gas from clorox if you work it right.
Geekdom owes a lot to MIT Model Railroad Club of half a century ago.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Voltron had some great toys. And I mean the Voltron made out of tigers not the space one. To me Voltron only came second to GI JOE. Speaking of robot toys. At the same time of Voltron I used to watch this cartoon Transor Z. Did anyone ever have any of these toys? I never saw one. Maybe the female robot with it's breast missles raised to many eyebrows.
Isn't that THE classic Christmas toy?
Monopoly - since 1934, over 5 billion little green houses have been built!
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Lots of fun playing with that when I was a kid.
The other big toy in the house (besides Legos, already mentioned) was electric slot cars (Tyco, AFX, etc). We had enough track to run all around the basement, and even up the walls :)
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Your kid will despise you!
Toys represent everything that's wrong with modern western civilization. They enforce the notion that there is a difference between "work" and "play".
Toys are an artificial construct popularized by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations in the late 1800's. The inherent psychological principle is that if you mentally dissociate your job from the context of your normal life, then you are willing to put up with a constant low level of dissatisfaction in exchange for a reward of "play time" or "toys".
Thus, by encouraging your children to "play", you are psychologically destroying them and reducing their future potential to that of an assembly line worker. People endure 40-60 hours of pure crap every week of their lives with the dubious reward of "vacation", or a nice car, or time to watch TV as their only reward. Toys simply lay the groundwork for this type of pathological motivation.
What's the solution for this madness? Teach your children to enjoy working hard to accomplish their independent goals. Learning and discovery and adventure are rewarding without the need for false constructs. Hard work and proportional reward are the foundations of our country, and the entrepreneurial spirit should be encouraged at a very early age. Teach your children to live and enjoy life, rather than to simply endure it.
But, failing all that, buy them a Nintendo 64 and Goldeneye... that game rocks my face off.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
How about a baseball bat and a baseball...
How about a Jungle Gym?
How about some green plastic Army Men?
How about a playskool playset?(Farm, Town, Airport, Circus Train)
How about a bouncy ball?
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Not exactly low tech, but definitely old school:
Get your 10-12 year old kid hardware hacking with a 200-in-1 Electronics Kit, crystal radio kit etc... I still have my kits from 20 years ago stashed in the closet. These packages are an inexpensive way to teach kids what's behind the UI of electronic devices. They're also safe because it keeps kids away from 110/220v equipment. If nothing else, it'll keep them from tearing apart your electronics to see what's inside (or could give them the confidence to disassemble your stereo...).
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
M.U.S.C.L.E guys Serpentor (GI Joe) Slush Mug A Red Ryder carbine-action 200 shot range-model air rifle Garbage Pail Kids Chia Pet Stomper 4x4 Ranger Rick magazine
But the erector set has a history of not only being fun, but sparking all sorts of engineering action in the brain for them youngsters out. I have no idea if you can find a place that sells them though.
signature pending slashdot approval
Between the ability to by bulk bricks, Technics, Mindstorms, etc. you can really build anything you think of.
Well, they may be educational for the blue collar kids, but I think the old school metal Tonka trucks were a lot of fun. The new plastic crap doesn't hold a candle to the metal trucks of my childhood. If it did hold a candle, it would probably melt.
I took a stroll through the toy section at a store recently, and frankly most of the toys look like crap. The new Transformers are junk compared to the Autobots and Decepticons of 15+ years ago. I don't think it is just nostalgia, but a real decline in the quality of the toys. I am sure this holds true for many things, and is probably a reflection of modern manufacturing practices and cost cutting requirements, but everything seems so crappy now.
I would like to get rubik's cube, but they make me angry. My 17 year old (female) cousin knows the trick but she isn't sharing. Guess I could google it.
-J
Fire in the sky
Playboy magazine. Classic and still popular among kids.
I see a lot of people touting Legos, and I agree. However, I also want to throw in just for good old wooden blocks. They are larger than Legos, so the younger tykes can use them without risk of swallowing them. Also, Legos snap together, and wooden blocks depend on finding the right balance when stacking to keep your structures sound.
Is the ancient and honorable YoYo.
Erector Sets with the little DC motor, and a chemistry set so you can mix all the "do not mix these together" chemicals together and see if you survive....
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Anyone else remember Simon, the (highly addictive)electronic game where you have to repeat the beeping light tone sequences? Fun, great for toddlers to get into memory games and build ... ya know, character I guess. I loved it, and not only can you find it on Ebay but they apparently still sell it (albeit smaller now, and with a transparent plastic body to jive it up for the 90's...)
========
77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
Here are a few things that spring to mind. I have two youner brothers-in-law (12 and 13) that I need to find gifts for and they are particularly hard to shop for.
Legos - This is a classic. I'd stay away from the sets that are designed to build a single item and try to buy bulk lego boxes. If you have a technically curious child to shop for, the Lego Mindstorms kits are awesome. Link here.
A model train set. For a kid interested in learning about this kind of thing, it's a great experience. This isn't a gift for everyone; I think most kids wouldn't give it a second look.
A Bicycle. Every kid should have one (provided you live somewhere that it's reasonable to ride). Lots of excercise, time outdoors, and a good social activity.
This is a little offtopic from your original question, but don't forget about not-so-classic but still fun toys. Two years ago I gave my brothers-in-law a copy of Ico for the PS2 and they fell in love. Their parents basically bought them whatever video game they wanted, which amounted to whatever was popular at the time. I like to think that I opened them up to the idea of playing games that required a little more thought than the average shooter. They've started buying less mainstream games since then, and I think it's helped them become more well rounded (they went from 'Halo is t3h best ever!' to 'Hey, have you tried Katmari Damacy?') which is a refreshing change. I'm not saying that one video game did that - I also made a point to show their mom the ESRB ratings on the games that she'd been buying them. Being educated about what's available for your kids is important, and it's nice to see Slashdot encouraging folks to look into not-so-hip but good presents.
Can anyone recommend any great games that have come out recently that will generally get overlooked due to the flashier titles (e.g. HL2, Halo2, Metroid Prime 2, etc)?
This doesn't "beg the question." It "asks the question," "suggests the question," or, "poses the question." Begging the question is a different concept.
petitio principii
How about one of those electric vibrating football tables rather than Madden 2005.
I spent days building the classic construction toys like Erector Sets, Kenner Panel and Girders, and Legos. Alas, some of these are banned as too dangerous with swallable small parts.
If they still make Capsula sets, try getting one. They are modular units that allow one to create mechanical devices and vehicles. I don't know if they are still being made, but I used to love them when I was a kid.
I used to build towns with legos, and race my hot wheels around in them.
The sweaty-armpitted llama leaps for a cluster of grapes.
?.Jly has accumulated about 4 different sets of Tinker Toys in various incarnations. My three kids play with them often. Anything that they can use their creativity with is good. Other classic toys that my kids like include:
Tinker Toys
Playdoh
Building blocks
Lincoln Logs
Legos
K'nex (not necessarily a classic, but will be)
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Legos, Tinkertoys, Capselas (if you can find them anymore).
:)
I remember much youth mispent building things with any and all of those three.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
I liked my big cardboard boxes.
One year I even got a set of large cardboard bricks to build a house.
So I'd play lego inside my own cardboard block house.
The other toy I like a lot are balloons. Every two year old I know thinks it is funny that I bounce a balloon off their head, over and over.
And of course at christmas a hockey stick, hockey net and a road hockey ball.
unfortunately, my kids consider model trains and slot cars to be beneath contempt. I don't even bother setting them up any more.
Clear, Dark Skies
no one has mentioned LEGO? ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How about a blonde 20 years old nanny... Great toy for both kids and fathers...
I remember as a kid, I always wanted to know how things worked (and I ended up in IT...go figure). Anyway, my dad figured this out pretty quickly after I disassembled my 15th transformer.
His solution was to get me a lot of toys that relied on principles of physics to work. Nerf projectiles, particularly the stomp on me to shoot a projectile from h=0 types, are really fun. It's like playing the artillery game in real life. Also, boomerangs, kites, home-made electromagnets, microscopes, lawn darts, croquet sets, giant styrofoam planes...all these things are both educational and genuinely fun.
adam b.
It's a known fact: boys from 7 to 70 _love_ to play with a big magnifying glass, say 4" or larger diameter. Remember looking in the mirror with one huge eye? Discovering you can project images onto a wall? Or best of all, frying ants on the front sidewalk? It's all still fun!
.nosig
That's not suprising. Many recent Lego products lack complexity and imagination, especially the movies sets like Harry Potter and Star Wars. They are also much more expensive than I remember.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
How about...
(Insert cheesy heavy metal bgm)
Crossfire! Crossfire! You gotta get into the crossfire! (Heavy metal scream) CROOOSSFIiIiIRrRrRE!
Just make sure you kid isn't the one on the opposite side of the table who gets humiliated. Bad for self-esteem.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
The metal ones we used to have were called Jarts. They were OK. I still prefer croquet.
I remember growing up with Legos/Duplos. Didn't have to be any of the special sets like they have now, just the big bucket and I'd be lost for hours....
"Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?" -Poe
Mattel, why hast thou forsaken me?
... I mean a true phsical instance with moving parts :), not a virtual one.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Simon is the classic toy that has 4 big buttons. The buttons flash and play tones in sequence, and the game is to repeat the sequence. It starts with one button/tone and adds one at each step. After the computer plays the sequence, you play it back by hitting the buttons -- if you mess up, you lose.
This is an awesome toy to build memory skills. It is also great for musical skills -- I used the tones to remember the sequence, and I subsequently had an easy time with musical instruments memorizing tunes.
Best of all, there is a new Simon on the shelves now. If you flip it over, it has a new "head-to-head" Simon game, but the original game is still there on the front side, unchanged.
You may be surprised to find out that one of the most popular "toys" that young children play with is the big box other toys came in. Year after year those boxes are a favorite.
That was a really great kit-100 different elecronic projects, suitable for kids, and educational, too!
Seriously, I learned all kinds of stuff from that kit, skills and knowledge that have come in handy many, many times in real life.
I don't know if they still make this anymore, but if they do, I would get one for my kid in a second!
They don't make a "big bucket of generic lego" anymore, at least I can't find it at Toys'R'Us.
All of their products are 10-piece kits that can only make one movie-tie-in thing and cost 29.99.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
These cubes are great. The outer surfaces are flat and the inner surfaces are pyramids. They fold and unfold from a cube to a rectangle to two pretty stars. Then you put them back together. They're not really a puzzle so much as a piece of worry-geometry. I could spend hours fiddling with one.
The stars are stellated rhombic dodecahedrons.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
BB Guns, slingshots, darts, lawn darts, boxing gloves, fireworks, etc...
Man I miss being a kid.
The Wham-O Air Blaster. I had such fun with that as a kid in the early 70's.. of course, the cats hated it.. Since my currents cats have not had the pleasure of experiencing the Air Blaster, I may just have to build my own.
I also enjoyed my Whee-lo - especially trying to see how fast I could get it to go...
Nothing - and I mean nothing - is a better toy for a kid than Legos. Especially a boy - and as a parent, let me tell you that there are differences between boys and girls. Anyone who says it's just environment or upbringing or education has an agenda - probably to fight reality. Period.
As a kid, I had three or four shoeboxes full of various Legos, and a bunch of the big pieces that didn't fit in the boxes. I'd spend hours making all kinds of things from dinosaurs to race cars and taking them apart in various ways. Or play with my brothers and friends in making dinosaur race cars and having a smash-up derby with the cars. Last one in one piece wins!
I saw a kit that sounds like what you're describing in one of those specialty gift catalogs that you only seem to get during the Christmas season. No idea what the name of the catalog is though, sorry.
Isn't everyone forgetting the greatest toy ever? The one always advertised during Ren and Stimpy cartoons? Log!!! It's log! It's log! It's big it's heavy it's wood! It's log! It's log! It's better than bad, it's good!
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
www.yoyoguy.com
They also have Unicycles.
Hours of fun playing around with basic-level electronics, and you get to learn some stuff too!
You used to see them all the time at Radio Shack and other stores, but I haven't seen one in person in over a decade. There are also different "sizes", but I can't recall what they are.
Chemistry Set?
Electronic Circuits Learner's Kits?
Robotic kits?
Can we please worry about christmas AFTER Thanksgiving please. Thank you.
Megabloks are the new lego, now that lego is focused on specialized piece models.
Check out the awesome dragon series.
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.
How can you forget the classic toy Legos? I spent three years stealing my brother's Pirate legos to create the perfect Final Fantasy 2(e) airship. Not to mention the hours that my brother and I spent creating castles and keeps and little lego armies, (and some really pretty cool prisons, especially when those lego skeletons showed up). We set them up on big pieces of plywood on either side of the staircase up into the attic, and put a narrow strip of plywood over the stairs for a bridge, and conducted campaigns.
But he quickly got too cool to play with either Legos or his sister.
Yes, there are women on Slashdot. Deal with it.
...hells yes! and legos!
anything you can build with.
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
"Toys? Where we're going, we won't need toys"
I have three children, (7, 4, and 1 month). The 7 year old and 4 year old love these games. The like the way they have to think (read out-think dad). Nothing gives them greater joy than knowing they figured something out that they did not know before or that someone else did not notice when they were looking at the board.
You want to challenge and stimulate their minds. Your kid probably wants the video games.
Just do what my father did - give them a computer built out of all that spare hardware lying around. Make sure it can't play games to start, but have the hardware lying around to fix that.
If they want those games, they'll get those mental powers going real quick.
what other classic toys do you remember from your youth that are still fun enough that kids will play with them today?
BOOBIES!
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
Has anyone else noticed that way fewer kids play with Mr. Potato Head these days? Man, there's the generational gap for you...
Sure, as a kid, I played legos a lot... but as an adult, I never got into them.
I bought a big box of them for my two year old recently. Once he got it, I started playing with him to get him used to the different things you can do with legos... and I just couldn't stop.
Yer damn right I plan on buying a whole lot more for him! Its a GREAT father-son activity!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle with a Compass in the stock.... .. but i'd probably shoot my eye out. =(
at http://www.marklin.com/Any starter set will do. Trix is fine if it must be two rail.
now counter a side 9box, and apply a little pressure- POP! goes the corner..
remove all pieces except the axes center pieces, and reassemble, along the way, study the fascinating mechanism that is a rubiks cube...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Fun with Legos!
Like the word "hacker" the original meaning of "to beg the question" has been overwhelmed by the popular meaning.
Resistance is futile.
Clear, Dark Skies
Baseball, glove, and wooden bat. Instructions and lesson for care of same, including the esoterics of neatsfoot oil and pine tar.
Large box of generic legos. Forget the little men, just give in bulk, including the long pieces. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of planning the project before building it, so as not to run out of the aforementioned long pieces.
Pocket knife and sharpening stone. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of blade oil (and keeping it off aforementioned stone).
Estes Rocket. Instructions and lesson for use and care of same, including the esoterics of making it go faster through the use of pin striping and how to use a power strip as an ignition switch without causing electrocution.
Microscope. Instructions and lesson for use of same, including the esoterics of what's in saliva.
50-in-1 electronic project kit. Instructions and lesson for use of same, including the esoterics of using the FM transmitter project to override the sibling's favorite FM station.
sigs, as if you care.
eBay has quite a few of what is listed there available such as
Well, I built and flew both brands. But when it comes to cloning ancient out-of-production kits from my childhood, I build Centuri. The designs have a rakish retro charm.
Look at my recreations of an Aero-Dart, and a Hustler. These flew on honking big black-powder F motors that had to be delivered by Railway Express. I was about nine when these went out of production, and never thought I'd get 'em. As it was, I had to turn the balsa parts on a lathe and cut the decals from colored tape. (These flew on modern composite motors.)
StefanJ
An official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Not sure if these are still around, but I loved playing with it as a kid. Motors and sharp metal parts ...mmmmmmm
I agree... they are making very specific sets, with a lot of very specific pieces, which is contrary to what lego should really be (generic - make anything). On the other hand, I do like the sets that are not marketing tools...
I like the train sets, including the old fashioned ones they have now, and for that reason I like the newest Harry Potter train - because it's a very traditional type of train.
The problem is that there are plenty of cool pieces that you can only get in sets. Even the online store doesn't let you buy many of the things I'd be inclined to buy...
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that you can kill two birds with one stone with Lego train sets - both electric trains and Lego were my favorite things when I was little. Using these sets you have an excuse to build whole Lego cities.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
My five-year old and I have an extensive collection of Bionicle and Star Wars lego. Combine it with a motor or two from Inventor's kits and you have the ability to create stuff that's way WAY cooler than you can do with the basic bucket-o'-parts. If you've got a mechanical engineer for a kid (rather than an architect (plain legos) or a hacker (Mindstorms)), I'd go with the Inventor's kits and the Bionicles. Of course, the big problem with Bionicles is you need a critical mass of sets before you have enough parts to put together the really cool stuff...
Car, Ship, Airplane Models.
This year's hot toy will be the Alf pog.
I am an AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego), and I think that they are the coolist thing ever. Check out some of the more interesting LEGO sites on the net:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/recent.cgi A massive gallery of uber cool models made by AFOLs. There are some really amazing models posted here.
http://www.brickset.com/ A lego set refrence that has just about every lego set ever made. Want to get a list of every classic space set made in 1978? This is the place.
http://www.bricklink.com/ Want 150 tan 1x3 bricks? Buy them individually from fellow collectors all over the world.
http://www.lugnet.com/ LUGNET is the Lego User Group. It has an interface to all all of the Lego USENET groups, and is an easy way to keep on top of all the relevant lego news.
http://shop.lego.com/ Of course there is LEGOs homepage. Online shopping, and all sorts of other interesting stuff. They just released a program on the lego site that allows you to build virtual lego models. That isn't really amazing, since LEGO cad programs have existed for years. However, they seem to be ramping up to allow people to build virtual models, and then order the parts to build them online! Every lego fan's dream come true...
There is much more, but that is a quick rundown of some of the major sites. Indulge yourself, you know you want to....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'm 17, and I'm asking for legos for christmas. That 300 dollar Star Destroyer model would be awesome santa! http://www.starwars.com/collecting/news/2002/09/ne ws20020923.html
This may be me finally hitting the "stay off my lawn" stage of my life, but oh well.
Stay away from the chemistry set. It's interesting and educational, but once most kids find out they can't cause giant explosions or create acid that eats through anything, they'll put it in the closet and never open it again. Nerf, Super Soaker, and even Lego Bricks all seem to have been castrated since my childhood. Nerf is barely alive, Super Soakers only come in weak 'squirt gun' versions, and even Legos seem to have gone entirely into specialized custom piece and movie tie-ins instead of the plain bricks that sparked so much creativity.
So with all the classic toys of my youth dying, what is left?
Model Rockets: Fun, safe (you'll be there, sharing the experience with your kid), and the explosion factor will cause most kids to enjoy it.
Marble Racing Sets: sort of an actual version of 'marble madness.'
If they're old enough, get them a chess set and teach them how to play.
But most of all, just spend time with your kid when he/she plays with the toys. They'll remember it for longer than you think.
It's two classic toys in one gift!
I liked my magnet set (magic action at a distance!), made electric motor, rail gun etc. I also liked the model steam engine I got with various attachments, weeks of smelly fun. Watch that the boiler doesn't run dry though, the solder they use melts too easily.
Trouble, a mistake or fun, your choice
Anyone remember POGs? Yup yup...good times...
a hoolahoop
Brio wooden train sets. Lionel and HO size electric trains. Lego and other building sets.
People on slashdot have this knee jerk reaction to think that themed lego is bad.
It is not.
1) Great way to get a child interested in Lego
2) You don't have to use the themed pieces as they where intended. When you see a child use those themed pieces in a creative way to create something that owuld have been IMPOSSIBLE to crate 20 years ago, you'll relize the themed piece can ADD to the imangination process.
3) If A child only build a kit as per the intrustions, and them leaves them alone they weren't going to get anything out of Lego anyways.
4) they help keep the Lego company around.
Hah! Take that!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And of course he still transforms into one bad-ass semi.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I have read that each new Lego set needs to include a new piece. After how many years of new sets, I would imagine this would get pretty difficult, and would explain why some sets come with pre-built walls and weird (dumb) stuff like that.
More sugar!
The following list comes to mind: Light Brite Legos Tinker Toys Etch-A-Sketch Rubik's Cube Erector Set (metal one with nuts and bolts) and of course the Red Ryder BB Gun (you'll shoot your eye out)
I'm going to be getting me a load of dowell, some rubber bands and make some transtegrity sets like these.
Christmas presents should provide fun on Christmas day, and shouldn't be so expensive that the recipient feels bad about chucking them on boxing day.
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
I was mentioning the steep price of the big Lego kits to my mother the other day. She commented that Lego sets were equally expensive when I was a child. The main catch is that sets now come with a high number of specialized parts that are only good for the set they come with. Where else will you use the battlements from the Harry Potter castle unless you want to make a freaky-looking brown Tie Fighter?
My favorites were always the space sets, and I remember getting a handful of specialized parts (like the doors, the windows, the engines, etc). For the most part, though, you got a crap load of generic bricks that you could use to build your own stuff.
Red ryder bb gun with compass in stock...
Daisy
And get the DVD Christmas Story to go along with it.
but war & pestilence will do if you're in a pinch 5pm on xmas eve
How many of those battery powered gizmos will still work at all in five years, much less thirty? Although, come to think of it, there's an old pre-Technics Lego gears-and-motor set in our stuff that still works....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Generates curves from harmonic motion via mechanical arms and a rotating turntable. Real metal construction w/paper discs for output.
(Picture (scroll down) and instruction sheet here, please be gentle!)
Predated the Spirograph, which draws epicycloids. Magic Designer appears to be out of production, but you might find one on ebay. (And yes, I still own mine, and no, it's not for sale.)
When I grew up, I wrote a Magic Designer emulator in Pascal as a class project.
Can't go wrong with big Lionel toy trains! Get the old transformers that you can also use to electro weld with. We don't need no stinking UL labels! Smoke, 290 Watts of AC under the aluminum tinsel of the tree is great fun for all!
A local store Massachusetts has a bewildering variety of construction toys...Forget yer kids: Buy these things for yourself and let them see you having a great time with them!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Lego is actually listening to people like you. They released the Designer series that has a lot of great basic bricks. You tend to get more bricks for the buck, and less hyper-specialized pieces.
There alot of people in the Adult Fan Community that have been saying this for yeats, and lego is paying attention.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
to late lady.
We call them Legos.
People are going to call them Legos regardles of which company made the inteconected bricks.
Thats the price of extablishing a well know brand name with a great product. welcome to MY worls.
Signed
--Thermos
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Instead of giving a laptop for Christmas, I decided to give an Etch-A-Sketch. It's just as useful; here's a short how-to guide:
How do I turn my Etch-A-Sketch off?
Pick it up and shake it.
What's the shortcut for Undo?
Pick it up and shake it.
How do I create a New Document window?
Pick it up and shake it.
How do I set the background and foreground to the same color?
Pick it up and shake it.
What is the proper procedure for rebooting my Etch-A-Sketch?
Pick it up and shake it.
How do I delete a document on my Etch-A-Sketch?
Pick it up and shake it.
How do I save my Etch-A-Sketch document?
Don't shake it.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
What rolls down stairs
and over the chairs
and into your neighbor's dog?
It fits on your back,
It's good for a snack,
Everyone knows it's log.
It's log, it's log.
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood.
It's log, it's log.
It's better than bad, it's good.
BEST TOY, EVER!
That, or Happy Fun Ball.
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
gasoline and matches
Actually some of the Harry Potter sets have been the best that LEGO has done in a while. Check out the car in the "Escape from Privet Drive" set. http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=4728&cn=90&d=20 &t=3 That's not one big piece, but made up of many little pieces. And one of my personal favorites of the past few years.
& t=3 for hours of LEGO fun.
Star Wars has introduced a lot of new, larger LEGO elements, but you still can't top the "Imperial Star Destroyer" http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=10030&cn=8&d=5
"Video" games? I thought we were beyond such crude terms here at Slashdot...
:)
Lego is by far the best old toy there ever will be. Because it's a toy and not some new gimmick. How often do we see some new weapon in a FPS game and go "man that is going to rock!" and then run back to the trusty shotgun? It's the same principal. If it works don't mess with it, since lego works no one wants to mess with it.
Kids today all want to "grow up" and become "Teenagers" at 6. They won't have these toys and I don't see many people going "in my childhood we did drugs! Lets give our kid drugs".... wait maybe I do...
Either way if your kid is a druggy the bright colours will be fantastic
I like muppets.
Doesn't anybody remember that little orange plastic helicopter game where you go round and round trying to clip the rescue guy with rotor blades. Hours of fun with that game.
When I was a small kid there were 3 kinds of legos: ordinary legos, technics (more special cubes and moving parts), and big cubes for the smaller children. I visited a toy shop a couple of weeks ago, and when I came to the lego department I saw 200 (number exaggerated for dramatisation) spin-offs including the movie spin-offs, etc. Lego had a good product, branched out trying to reach "new audiences" (read: make more profit) and in the end destroyed a succesfull toy by making too many variations.
Oh sure, when I was a kid there were a few spin-offs like medeaval castles or some space-like setting, but never the blatant "hop along the latest hype so we can make more cash"-type of thing. Parents aren't much inclined to fork over 75€ for small Harry Potter lego-set when the 50€ Harry Potter videogame makes their child equally happy.
A lot of discussion has gone into this at my workplace, because as it turns out, most geeks have at some point owned legos. The general concensus is that most kids are more interested in video games than lego anyway. Lego takes more effort to play with (construct it yourself) than the average video game. I'm 26 and played with legos between ages 6 and 12. Most kids aged between 8 and 12 have computers (or consoles), and who wants to play with bricks if you've got a whole assortment of games at your disposal?
Legos never were really that cheap, but it was a toy that lasted years instead of the couple of days it takes to finish or get bored with a video game. When I have kids I'll keep that in mind, if lego is still around by then.
I'm not convinced that Rubik's Cube is that much of a classic. It's a fine mathematical puzzle, but given that it doesn't even have as much replay value as the 'traffic jam' puzzles, I think it still fits into the 'fad' category. What you're seeing this year isn't the sign of a classic, it's the sign of a fad rebound. Logic puzzles taken as a whole (the cube, traffic jams, burr puzzles, etc.) are a classic category, but for most of them the replay value is low. You're better off finding something that serves as art after you're done with it as a puzzle.
I don't know how old legos are but they are classics to me.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
The big Duplo bricks are actually compatible with normal Lego, so a small set of Duplo will continue to be useful when he moves on right up to to the Mindstorms robotics sets.
Give them a pack of Camels. You even get to keep the Camel points!
"Smoke 'em up, Jr.!"
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The best Christmas ever was when I got a lump of coal AND a shiny rock! Wooohooo! Also, some neighbors gave us a can of scrapple, so we didn't have to have Potted Meat(TM) that year. My last Christmas before going to college, my parents had scrimped and saved enough to buy me a pair of shoes. That rocked..
I loved the Big trak when I was a kid. It was great fun to program it to go through the house and stop and shoot the parents/pets/siblings. Nothing better than a light bulb "laser....
The only way to end war is for everyone to get a piece!
3000 pieces?! 1 meter long?! (That's three feet y'all.) Why can't they make a Star Trek Starbase like that?!
*sigh*
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
my penis.
The real problem ist that many of today's kids lack complexity and imagination. LEGO are just following that audience.
That tape player was awesome!
Press a b c or d now.
This got me thinking philosophically. Are today's kids luckier than we were as kids growing up? Did we derive more enjoyment out of our low-tech toys compared to a kid nowadays with the latest games on a PS2 or XBOX? I tend to think the latter but I'm not sure. And I'm 38 now.
You don't have to shake a Mac to clear the screen.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
It's fun to watch my kids and see what they play with and what holds their interest.
:)
We have a closet full of unused, battery powered 'interactive learning' gizmos.
What DO they like? Legos. Crayons. Sidewalk chalk. Wooden train tracks. Puzzles. Simple things that fire their imagination.
My five year old DOES love TuxPaint however
I don't know if anyone else had this, but Brio train sets were pretty awesome. Nice wooden pieces of track with wooden cars, coupled by magnets! Everyone loves magnets...probably explains why I'm a physics major today!
I'll also second the Lego vote...those two toys made my childhood worth it.
I got my son a Chaos Tower this Christmas. He is still too young to do it himself, but he loves these kinds of toys. It definitely isn't cheap, but it isn't as mind numbing as a video game either.
I know what I'll be building Christmas morning...
and an orange, and a bag of m&m's, a sled and a foam bat to hit people on the way down the hill. Trippy space-age color-changing stuff, food, and transportation -- That's a few days'worth of vacation time well spent!
stuff |
(which actually means two words.. "Play well"). I played with Lego from the time I could pick up the blocks, and 26 years later I'm still playing with lego. It's a great educational toy as well.
My kids (16 & 14) are getting a little old to be interested in Lego much, except for the Robotix system (Thing2 is currently in the FIRST Lego League).
MtG is still big.
D&D is still occasionally played.
Board/Boxed games such as Settlers of Catan still proves popular, although newer ones such as Munchkin, Apples to Apples, etc. get more play time. I'm trying to get them interested in some old Avalon-Hill boxes I've got lying around such as Kingmaker, Diplomacy (probably not mature enough) and Rail Baron.
Design for Use, not Construction!
legos legos legos
Wow, your Toy'R'Us sux. Hell even the overpriced grocery stores I check out their sets have more than 10 pieces and are under $5.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Gotta check this one out.... http://hover-copter.com and http://hoverdisc.com
Plain and simple. I eventually plan on turning a room into my house to build and construct with legos. It's a nice small, time consuming hobby that I never grew out of!
I'm gonna have to speculate on kids. Mine are in larte teens and early 20's snd too busy with studies to have made any grandkids yet.
;-)
Before starting the list some don'ts.
Sea monkeys
mice without a snake
ant farm
0) Popgun
1) Slide whistle (wolf whistle but you can actually play songs on it, remember spike jones? didn't think so)
2) Slingshot
3) For little kids there is nothing better than a handful of big nuts, bolts, washers, wingnuts, and a bunch of angled bits of metal with holes in them. It's like an erector set for toddlers. The plastic crap nut and bolt stuff is BAD BAD BAD because it does not have the feel of real life hardware. As your child develops in dexterity he will learn to appreciate the feel of something that fits together as it sould as opposed to the binding that occurs with the plastic substitute. He'll also learn about dropping heavy things on his toes
4)Animal trap.
5)Fishing pole, hooks, etc.
6)Gun or bow if he is old enough
7)Swiss army knife
8)leatherman
9)electronics tools and radio receiver kit.
I know you said toys, but classic tools are important too.
10)rubber band powered airplane.
11)kite
12)yo-yo
13)top
14)taxidermy kit
15)magic rocks
16)metal friction toys (plenty coming from china and cheap)
17)steam engine
18)two stroke engine from old lawnboy(tm) mower or if you can find one, small OMC wankle from snowmobile
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
MICRONAUTS were the coolest toys. And the Marvel Comic wasn't too bad, either. They developed a good background story to support these really interesting and diverse toys made by mego.
http://ramk.net/archives/000065.html
Hours of fun with this one.
That's double-plus ungood.
Besides, writing Lego in all-caps is really annoying. There is no reason for that other than making their name standing out in context. Like .NET or ATi. One capital letter is enough.
Calling the bricks "Lego bricks" is a valid request, though, since there really isn't anything called "a lego". At least not in my vocabulary. But that might be a matter of taste.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Back in the late 70's early 80's we used to play a game which was a
plastic football shaped thing with two wires going through it, two
payers held the end of the wires (handles) and the one who had the
ball on his side would rapidly span open his arms and shoot the
plastic ball to the other player.
Anyone remembers the name of this game? I want to get it for my kids
Thanks
Mike
Bah, you kids today ...
Get a whole bunch of other sets and make your own Star Trek base. That's what we did.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
In the past I have found playing with myself very enjoyable. In fact, I still enjoy playing with myself to this day.
My most memorable toy - KING DING! - http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/4011/html/ki ngdingviews.htm
w olf.html
l e/mattel_big_eagle_small_writeup.htm
Other toys on my list:
Mattel Hot Birds - http://www.hwprotos.com/menu-grp/hotbirds.htm
GI Joe Iron Knight Tank - http://members.aol.com/wheretoysr/tank.jpg
GI Joe Sea Wolf Sub - http://www.users.vance.net/grayarea/1152%20sea%20
Mattel Vertibird - http://www.nostalgia.condoris.net/vertibird.htm
1976 Mattel Space 1999 Eagle 1 - http://www.space1999.net/~catacombs/main/merc/eag
and finally, a 1976 Testor's SPIRIT OF 76 gas powered tethered plane.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Or, just give your kid the ones you played with. They're probably still in great condition :) Our tonka trucks survived my older brother, me, and 20 odd years of visiting children to my parents. My son plays with them now.
Fisher Price are similar, I don't think it's possible to kill a fisher price toy. He plays with my old fisher price stuff as well.
No, I'm not cheap. He has new toys of his own, but I'm impressed how well mine have held up.
There's no way in hell I would give such a high quality toy to a child. The 20th Anniversary Prime is so masterful is many ways, it would be a waste to have a child shred it. A better suggestion would be to get him the 1984 remake of Optimus Prime! Just like we used to have (and cheaper too).
I built all of the ships when I was a kid, but I don't think I EVER had enough pieces to build a Starbase of that magnitude. Besides, mine would have been rainbow colored. ;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What, nobody here likes yoyos? or yoyo tricks anymore?
Get'em a 15 dollar ball-bearing yoyo and a copy of The Yonomicon and watch'em turn into amateur knot-theorists!
It took me until college to realize I had the disposable income to buy lots of cool yoyos -- I just wish they'd been making cheap, good ball-bearing ones when I was a kid...
I don't remember these from my youth, and that's unfortunate. The "gifts" are actually a series of educational toys to help in child development. They were created by a crystallographer who also happened to invent kindegarten. There's a surprising amount of math buried in the toys.
Froebel Gifts
My brother and I would do the same thing!
Rules:
We'd try different techniques--increasing the mass, using as few pieces as possible, trying different centers of gravity, building a ramp front-end to try to flip the opponent, building a "lance" aimed at what we thought was the opponent's weakest piece, etc.
We played this game from elementary-school age even through high school. It was a fun exercise in creative thinking and we were learning engineering skills as well!
Now I'm teaching my daughters the game--they like it too.
-bp
bp
Annonymous Coward here. Last Christmas I found some rainbrow Bright dolls for my little cousins. They love them. they were, in fact, their favorite presents. Just goes to show you that a simple concept never really goes out of style. they are not obsessed with rainbrow Bright (but not, i think, in an unhealthy way).
"Begs the question" is not the same as "raises the question."
"Begs the question" refers to a specific logical fallacy, where you use an unproven premise to define itself. This is NOT a case of this.
Raises the question, is a conversational phrase meaning that if a is true, then what are the ramifications of a.
This is similar to ESL folks that are taught "too much" instead of "a lot", and say things like "there is too much sand on the beach" or "there is too much people dancing at the party." It is just safer to say "Raises the question" and never say "Begs the question" because you will be correct too much more often.
Because all the harry potter, star wars crap is dumb! Nobody wants that stuff.... what happened to building the town with the police station, space shuttle, etc? I used to spend DAYS at a time building that stuff. Now, all I see on store shelves is worthless "harry potter sorcerer" crap.
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Fun Ball.
Caution: Happy Fun Ball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Happy Fun Ball Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use Happy Fun Ball on concrete.
HFB
the perfect toy for boys and girls, young or old.
:)
fess up. how many of you still have Legos from 20+ years ago?
the history of the world
Get a wrist-rocket style slingshot. This is the type
that has a wrist brace to allow for more power.
To go with it, get some marbles (cheap) and some
3/8" steel balls (better, and lead-free).
A machete is fun.
A hatchet (hand axe) is fun.
A blowgun is fun.
A crossbow is fun. You can get a compact one
that will take normal-sized darts.
See a pattern here? If the consumer product safety
commision or law enforcement would get nervous,
you've identified a fun toy.
We also had Capsella and Erector Sets (both the old metal one that came with an electric motor and the later lame plastic set). Now the one I always lusted after was Robotix, a set of which a friend down the street owned. Solid pastic pieces that connected with hex-connecters and all sets came with motors and generally an associated remote control. Building vehicles to battle each other was fun, as was the time we built a working arm.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I always loved my erector set. I don't know about these new-fangled sets, but maybe they'd be ok.
One of my favorite toys growing up was my microscope set. You could either get a new high-tech one that hooks up to the PC, or you could just get a classic one. There are also lots of cool toys at http://shopping.discovery.com/ . And for Jebus' sake, don't get them any "themed" toys like Harry Potter or Mickey the Corporate Whore.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
One of my favorite christmas gatherings was the one when my cousin got a Merlin. I learned how to play music and play blackjack in the same day. There was a simon/memory game function, magic square strategy game...it was fantastic!
nanotech seamonkey robots that REALLY LOOK LIKE MONKEYS. ...monkeys that really do tricks. ...and build little towns. ...and cover the world in grey goo in a 48hour period.
mmmm, goo.
Are Tonka trucks still unbreakable? When I was a kid, I had one that was outside and abused for a decade and worked just fine. I hope they are still made from the good stuff.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
You can never go wrong with Lego.
Rule of thumb.
Besides, they're in dire financial straits and we need to help them out. Maybe they'll bring back just plain ole bricks vs. specialised or licensed stuff.
check out their online store:
www.lego.com
do() || do_not();
The complete list
Magic School Bus - we like most of the original series by Joanna Cole.
Leapster Multimedia Learning System - Daughter has as severe addiction to this. But hey its eductional. We got the K and GR 1 cartridges
Math Mat Challenge Game - active learning
6" Disney Princess Scooter with Lights - Scooter. Learn to balance - call it a pre bike riding tool.
Schoolhouse Rock! (Special 30th Anniversary Edition) DVD (DVD) - Fun
Classic Tinkertoy Construction Set - Jumbo - Classic toy - favorite of several nobel prize winners.
The New Way Things Work - Classic - save it for later.
Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? - Gives kids an idea of how big the universe really is
Too Many Kangaroo Things to Do! - Well done series of books that teach math concepts - check out all of them.
Cardinal Chess & Checker Cabinet - Checkers is a lot of fun after dinner
The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in Tibet is her all time favorite. Tintin teaches you about friendship, travel, and other cultures.
Encyclopedia of the Human Body by Richard Walker - Amazing illustrations
What Makes a Magnet? - Nice description of electricity and magnets. She loved the experiments. Check out the other books by Franklyn M. Branley or read a loud science books.
A Street Through Time by Anne Millard
The Penny Pot by Stuart J. Murphy - Stuart Murphy has several books that are great - they teach math. My daughter loves money and loves this book.
The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus by Aliki (Paperback) - Aliki does a great job of bringing history to life - check out her other wonderful books as well.
Chemistry set, microscope, telescope. Oh yeah - Mouse Trap (the game, not the object, though we had several of the later around the house to play with, too)...
That is all.
We'll only be happy when all words and phrases mean "urgh" again. :)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
My Mechano set was one of my favorite toys for a number of years. As my ability increased, additions were made, including geared electric motors and gearsets.
When I entered my teens, the Mechano set was almost thrown out as my interests moved to grils and motorcycles. My parents put it away and I completely forgot about i until my son was six when it re-appeared as his birthday present.
As with many things, my thrill at seeing that amazing engineering toy when I was 8 was not duplicated by my son who preferred his new C64.
I fondly remember chemestry sets, many different construction toys and electric trains.
Have you taken any advanced math courses? I took a degree in math undergrad, and took two courses in Abstract Algebra. Very interesting stuff...
One of the topics deals with commutators... elements in a group such that they are of the form aba^-1b^-1 (a, b, a inverse, b inverse) where a and b are in the group.
You can show that the various moves on a cube are a group, and then show that various commutators (such as FRONT CLOCKWISE, RIGHT COUNTERCLOCKWISE, FRONT COUNTERCLOCKWISE, RIGHT CLOCKWISE) relate to 3-cycles. Plainly speaking, a 3-cycle on a cube is when 3 edge pieces or corner pieces rotate amongst each other, and the other pieces STAY THE SAME!
Armed with this knowledge, it is straightforward (but sometimes laborious!) to solve a cube in random position without resorting to canned moves.
I wrote a paper on this for the second course, and while speaking about it, solved a cube "live." Clearly I used the "canned move" approach, and could have solved it earlier than the end of the speech, but just kept it close and cycled through a 3-cycle until the speech ended. 10 seconds later, I set the (solved) cube down and walked off.
Drama king? No. Geekest link? You betcha.
--
wwjd? jwrtfm!
I had one of these babies as a kid and passed it down to all my brothers. You can still buy them at your local Wally World
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
This'll probably be lost in the great pool of lost replies, but here goes: This one can be quite fun. Its a wooden stick which you try to catch a ball on top and on the sides. One of my favorite skill/puzzle type toys. (Besides the get the ring of the horse shoes puzzles :D )
Linky-- Here
Man, I really hope you don't have kids. They're just kids, man.
"Fun" is not socially constructed. Toys have existed in one form or another throughout history. If kids were too poor to afford any toys, then they sang (for example this).
Or played some sort of game.
Or played with a dog.
Or just run around and chase each other.
Kids need this early time in life to develop everyday skills that we take for granted, especially social skills. Even though games may not have the tangiable benefit that you are looking for, they do provide something useful for kids. The skill that they learn at this time through games is what allows them to provide the useful benefits for society they will use later as adults that you want them to produce as kids.
Sadly, I suspect that the metal sets would no longer be considered safe for kids anymore. *shrug* Which makes sense from a pure safety perspective, as I know we banged ourselves up repeatedly making weapons out of the pieces in addition to scrapes from burrs on the pieces and a few cases of hair or skin getting caught in the open workings of the motor. *wry grin* And then there was that incident where I got thrown across the patio by an electric shock. But in retrospect, yanking the cord out of the outlet when on a rain-soacked patio was not the brightest of moves for all that I had good intentions. (My little sister, Eileen, was reaching for the plug. Her being a toddler, I knew she wouldn't remove it safely, so I did so. Ouch...)
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I'm a 'boomer' with three daughters. They suffer from having an engineer for a father, but there *are* benefits to having a geek for a father. We will buy just about any cool toy in a heartbeat. Well, at least something *we* consider cool or remember playing with as a child.
Lincoln Logs - wood is good
Tinker Toys - more wood
Erector Set - metal is good
Checkers, chess, dominos - wood boards and pieces, even little kids can learn to play.
chinese checkers - my girls use a cool >50 year old metal set that rotates to cover storage bins for the marbles.
Duncan tops - wood with replacable plastic tips. I was playing around with one in the mall and we had a group of 10-15 kids gathered around who had never seen a top 'in real life'.
Duncan yo-yo's - available online as a 'classic set' including the butterfly and double diamond
kites - the simple, easy to fly ones, not the fancy stunt kites
boomerang - more wood, if you get a good one, they really return. Either the banana or 'X' type are easy to find and even the kids can get them to return with a little practice.
microscope - go for good optics, not maximum magnification, then look at stuff like newspaper print, pond water and maybe some old food in the fridge.
telescope - look for good optics, not maximum magnification and a good tripod, then take it out into the country at night and find as many planets as you can.
rockets - in order of price - baking soda and vinegar, water and air pressure, Estes. They are all really cool. We used to shoot baking soda rockets the height of the house (and onto the roof). The water pump rockets could clear the roof and the Estes rockets can get you arrested.
chemistry set - they still don't include saltpeter, but you can some kits pretty cheap that include experiments that will hold the interest of grammar/middle school kids.
frenel lens - I got mine at Edmund Scientific before they closed. Its a large, flat plastic lens consisting of concentric circles to focus sunlight into a small diameter 'furnace'. We used to melt lead weights used to balance automobile wheels, and used Air Force issue goggles used to track objects across the face of the sun to protect our eyes. God knows if the lead fumes will shorten my life...
slide rule - just checking to see if you read this far, but I'm also serious that everyone should know how to perform multiplication and division on a slide rule. Just because.
How about classic children's literature? Tom Swift was great as were many of the boys fiction from the 40's and 50's (e.g. Dave Dawson). Give a gift that will last.
Has always and will always be the best gift for young children (and some geeks).
I loved my Tonka trucks. Had them when they still made them out of metal, with lovely sharp edges and corners. It was a shame when they switched to those bloated looking plastic things.
The 150 piece bucket. Endless hours of nut and bolts fun.
And some board games too: parcheesi, monopoly, hungry hippos, candyland.
video console. Man, I remember having the nintendo when it first came out. Every friend I saw I was like "HEY GUESS WHAT, I GOT A NINTENDO!" everybodY "WOAH." and we'd play for hours at Kid Icarus. Nowadays, not so sure. Electronics are always great welcomed gifts from portable audio to entertainment systems or whatever. Anything with buttons that does beep beep beep.
Who would like to bet that Wal-Mart is causing Lego to hurt? From what I understand, Wal-Mart is extremely aggressive in buying from their supplier at the cheapest price possible.
Many of the US Toy comanies are hurting badly because of Wal-Mart aggressiveness.
PS - Harry Potter legos suck, but the Star Wars sets have some cool parts that could be used on other things. When I used to buy the specialty kits as a kid, I would build them in under an hour, then destroy them and build something from scratch with all the cool parts!
There's nothing better than a Pirate piloting my Lego Dune Buggy for the Baja 1000 (with laser blasters on the dune buggy)!
I give you, LEGO Video Games.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Maybe I'm missing your point
There is no direct correlation between the internals and the faces -- other than the stickers are attached to the faces and preserve their relative placement on the pieces.
It's just got the nice sane starting point of each face is all one colour when it's complete. By definition once you've made all of the faces a solid colour, the internals of the cube will be consistent with that arrangement of faces.
If I take all of the stickers off of a rubiks cube, the faces don't know that. Heck, remove all of the stickers and re-surface each face in its entirety in one colour like a brand new cube. That will give you a fully working rubiks cube which appears to have been solved. Thereafter it will work exactly like all other cubes do.
Now, if you arbitrarily move stickers, you're in for a world of hurt. But most anyone moving the stickers to cheat isn't going to put them on randomly. If you're doing it to drive someone insane it would probably work, 'cus as you pointed out, a whole lot more permutations.
But I most decidedly saw a lot of people in the 80's just re-do the stickers to get a finished cube.
It might change wether blue and green are on opposite or adjacent faces and the like, but it is a rather effective way to get a cube 'finished'.
But you'd be really incorrect to think that if you made all of the faces each with one solid colour that the cube would cease to function. It's built in such a way as to guarantee it will continue to work.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
See here.
the original sims! Or, if you really want to go classic, get them an Apple IIe w/ 48K, and a copy of The Oregon Trail, and Zork.
Don't forget to add a sheet or blanket, too. Our 2-year-old (as of this past Tuesday, actually :) is endlessly entertained by a cardboard box and a sheet which can be used to line the box like a nest, or to cover the upside-down box, making it a picnic table, or to cover the opening of the sidewise-lying box, making it a cave ("tunnel!", she insists, and who am I to argue? We haven't covered 'topology' quite yet).
The box itself was a great find, and the addition of the sheet multiplied its uses manyfold.
It also made me unbelievably happy when she spontaneously grabbed a book and a flashlight, and scampered into the darkened cave ("TUNNEL!") to "read" the book to herself.
Or maybe asteroids?
My favorite xmass was the year (I was 10) that my Dad bought me a hooker, a 45 auto, & a big sack of ganja.
> They don't make a "big bucket of generic lego" anymore, at least I can't find it at Toys'R'Us.
Bullshit. It is even featured on the main page of legoshop.com
http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=4411
Legos are awsome. I buy about 1 set a month for my childs (okay, we probably now have 20K pieces...).
Some sets are better than others, but specialized pieces are not the problem (it is amazing how you can recycle those). The problem is that:
1/ Lego pieces last forever. You run out of reason to buy new ones.
2/ You ability to build don't scale with the number of pieces. (Contrary to computers, it takes a *lot* of pieces/time to do something big). Hence the 20K pieces are not *that* usefull
And for people that says that todays set sucks, it is because they have not tried things like http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=8455 (amazing)
Then there was the time I found my wife under the tree wearing that really hot teddy i got her at Victoria's Secret. Really provided hours of fun(and learning too!) Never gets boring, and can alway find new things to play!
Kids will have fun with that for days.
AccountKiller
The remade Football and Football II are just as much fun as the original LED versions from 25 years ago (Ack! 25 years!), and they're about half the price now--in unadjusted dollars, no less.
A slinky of course.
The plastic ones work well and don't get tangled like the metals one did (memories of burying my metal slinky cause it was too tangled).
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
you always wished you could have: a drum set
I LOVED my blocks, and they augment rather than replace legos.
A little quick googling got me found me a set that reminds me of my blocks.
Countless, castles, pyramids, forts, were built with my wooden blocks, often with lego vehicles and figures running around, through them, and often falling vitim to hidden booby traps.... round columns placed on their side perched above some isosolese blocks can wipe out whole hordes of invading legomen when let loose!
This is a truly classic toy been around for 100+ years and now has all sorts of electronic controls.
Plus well made enough so that this year's set will be around for your grandchildren
Speak and Spell, no longer around, but MAN! that thing was fun. you could play all sorts of games on it, buy new cartridges, and no matter how many times you played, you could never remember the 6 letter word for the guessing game.
I miss that. What was the other? It was green, and had math. Speak and speel was Red, see and say was yellow? well, it wil come to me.
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
Legos never got old, never! Especially when you can build computer cases out of them.
Constructs (though these don't seem to be around anymore.) I built tons of neat vehicles for my GI Joes out of these.
And I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Erector sets! You call yourselves nerds! Sheesh!
You should look and/or call around more. For example, Lego item 4496 is a 1000-piece bucket of nonspecialized blocks:
http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=4496 -- Lego info/purchase page
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
http://www.google.com/froogle?q=lego+4496&btnG=Se
http://stores.ebay.com/ibuyifdpriceisright_Lego-B
How much more classic can you get (I mean besides maybe light)
As a kids rocks (and not the damn pet kind either) held quite a lot of our attention. We used them for everything from ammo to structural members of the dams we built over the streams of water running down the street. They were easy to come by and more durable than either legos or erector sets.
When we discovered that they came in house sized and larger models we were really hooked. We'd spend all day just trying to climb to the top. And after that the smaller versions didn't maintain nearly as much of our interest.
Now that I am an adult (by some standards) and have a child of my own (she'll be ~7 months old at Xmas) I'll be introducing her to the joy rocks have to offer. She'll be getting a trainer rock. Through the wonders of science, some genius has come up with a toddelerized inflatable rock wall that'll be more appealing to the wife than planting a full pitch sized piece of granite in the back yard.
Socks?!
EIGHT pair, can you believe it?! And Scott, for you, some slacks!
I have no idea if the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle is still being made, but it should be. This was the Evel Knievel action figure that rode on top of a motorcycle that had a gyro inside to keep it upright. You put it on the platform and gave the crank a couple of turns and hit the trigger, and it would take off and do a wheelie. It was able to make a jump and land properly, so we had hours of fun setting up more and more death-defying stunts for poor old Evel, such as the "Flaming Hoop of Death". We even did a remake of the classic "Jump the Shark" Happy Days episode starring our toy rubber "Jaws" shark. :-)
\/\/oobie
Nuts and bolts beats bricks in the technical innovation stakes...
And plain old basic wooden building blocks in various shapes and colours...
Ask me how I know :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Anyone else get one of those big ol' Erector sets full of nuts, bolts, screws and metal pieces?
Especially great were the sets that came with motors! Throw in some gears and pulleys and the imagination was the limit.
Another back from the 70s were the Riveton (Rivetron?) sets, a plastic sort of Erector set with rubber rivets instead of nuts & bolts.
And who could forget the classic "Girder N Panel" sets? Anyone else have those sets of little columns and girders that came with plastic window and roof panels? In the 70s there were a couple of different sets, one with special pieces for bridges and one with window/roof panels for skyscrapers. But before that there were many many different types of sets.
I bought a few of the star wars episode 1 themed lego sets.
The darn things fell apart. The individual legos were made of some soft, flimsy plastic that cracked after being re-arranged a few times.
These were NOT the legos of my youth. It is as if they expected you to assemble the destroyer droid and let it collect dust, without ever disassembling it to make anything else.
So, I would recommend that they stop cranking out legos that you can't actually play with.
I don't think they make a 50-in-1 project kit that comes with an FM transmitter. AM transmitter, yes, FM, no.
sigs, as if you care.
For kids just a little older, give them a large cardboard boxes and let them take out the top and bottom flaps (with scissors, if they're responsible, or just rip `em out).
With crayons, you can color the outside of the box with headlights, tail lights, etc.
Then you can run around for hours with the "car" held up around your torso playing as if you're driving a real automobile.
Works best with largely blank outsides of boxes: it wouldn't do if Junior was running around the neighborhood with either the old Smirnoff Vodka box or the old Kotex Tampons box....
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Wow! Thanks for bringing back a lot of great memories! My microscope was one of my absolute favorite toys as a kid. Given that this is Slashdot and all, I guess I shouldn't be too ashamed of many happy afternoons spent trying to find all kinds of neat "bugs" in a drop of pond water, despite how hopelessly nerdy I'm sure it must sound.
According to this page, Fisher Price no longer makes them.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Tinker toys. You can't beat them. They are re-released now, with bigger pieces (probably so it is harder to choke on them). I liked the smaller ones better, but the one ones are still cool.
Lincoln Logs are also cool. It is easy to build, and even easier to smash things!
learn all about electricity, construction, complex systems and whats better they've started integrating A/V stuff, wireless controllers.
For some reason, applying vaseline to my toys to "improve the 'feel'" sounds vaguely wrong, let alone my kids' toys...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Half Life 2. I hear that it's an "instant classic."
See subject. Approximately a 2:3 sugar/potassium nitrate ratio, melt on stove over conservative heat until fully combined but not caramelized. Can be formed before cooling. Shoots flame and massive quantities of smoke. Good for bus shelters, mall food courts, and school yards. Potassium nitrate can be usually purchased bulk at large Chinese groceries if you have such things. I'm not sure what Chinese people use it for, but the clerks usually tell you that it's not a seasoning and you shouldn't use it on your food.
I converted my daughter's Thomas the Tank Engine train table to a Lego workbench at her fifth birthday. She hasn't gotten into it too much, but her friends love it. However, the one who has used it most of all is me. My wife often has to yell several times to get us (me) to come downstairs for dinner.
Just bought a polaroid 200 for a nieces 4 yr old birthday. She loves being able to take pictures. She's done a great job with it too, because she can see how the picture looks as soon as she takes it. She knows to wait for the flash, and how to set the exposure with the little pictures of the house/ sun/ clouds. I wanted to get her a digital, but I didn't trust her mom to transfer images to their pc.
Mainway Toys Pretty Peggy Ear-Piercing Set, Mr. Skin-Grafter, General Tron's Secret Police Confession Kit, Doggie Dentist, and of course, the Bag O' Glass.
TODO: Insert witty sig
I'd have to say good ole' greed based, capitalism at it's fines Monopoly.
Thanks, Beannie
Greetings,
I represent the tobacco lobby. Nothing in this country gets done without our say so.
Models - The classic ones that are near impossible to find anymore. Not the dump snap in ones either. I remember sitting as a kid in a closed room with that glue.... uhh. where was I?
Anyways, your kid wants a toy plane or something, get them a model set so they can build one. It's even more fun. Then they can paint it, canniblize parts to build cooler things, and then blow them up when they become teenagers.
Erector Sets
Tinker Toys
Lincoln Logs
Blocks (for the smaller kids)
and of course, classic legos (but that's already been mentioned enough here.
Dont know if you still get this. It was a bald mans face, printed on a board base with a transparent cover about 1/4" above it. Inside the transparent cover were lots iorn whiskers which you could drag around to form hair, beard etc. And whats more the force field lines when the magnet was near look just like those hi res pictures of the sun. The same physics! Meccano was also cool, and chemistry set, even electric trains, although we never built ours up very large.
Halo and an XBox. I think that was the turning point in my development.
Until about a few years back, Lego was in quite a bit of trouble. They had decided to go down the merchandising route, but the Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. sets did not sell anywhere near as expected, resulting in large losses for the company which had been historically profitable. After a few executive changes, Lego did the right thing: Focus on basic sets that let children build countless different creations. Lego was able to offer these new sets at lower prices since they did not have to pay any merchandising fees to studios, etc. The new Designer and Creator sets from Lego are much more suited to letting the imagination of the kids dictate the play.
Don't forget that a lot of whiteboards are magnet-friendly these days so they make an awesome whiteboard toy. You can even embellish with diagrams, instructions, etc...
I think i was maybe 5 or 6 years old when I got this for Christmas around 1984 or so. This was one of my most favorite toys of all time. It was a motorcycle that was held in a "launch pad" with a gear. You would crank this sucker to how ever fast RPM you could crank this and as soon as you reversed the crank it would kick the back wheel out and the bike would take off. Now this doesn't sound too exciting in itself, but when you start making ramps and seeing how high/far you can jump this toy bike it's a blast.
Construx. Those beams would shatter into multiple shards of plastic that would embedd themselves in your foot. And then there were thr connectors, which were essentially miniature plastic caltrops.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
... I just bought the "Ren and Stimpy" DVD boxed set, so I've heard this a few times recently :
What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs?
Rolls over your neighbor's dog?
What fits on your back and great for a snack?
It's Log, Log, Log!
It's LO-OG! It's LO-OG!
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood!
It's LO-OG! It's LO-OG!
It's better than bad, it's good!
Come on and get your Log!
You're gonna love it: Log!
Everyone needs a Log! (trails off)
(voiceover)
Log! From Blammo!
Oh, how I need to get a life, but R&S is one fantastic show!
!! Dark Tower !!
!! Dark Tower !!
!! Dark Tower !!
When I was a kid I always wanted Optimus Prime As I'm sure most of you know he's the leader of the Autobots (the good-guy Transformers). Anyhow, one year when I was about 8, I got Megatron - leader of the Decepticons (the baddies). Stuff the pic of that bastard. What can I say... I was crushed. So much so that I had dreams that I had gotten Optimus instead.... fast forward 17 years (ya know... roughly) and they had a 20th anniversary Optimus Prime and my Mom gave it to me for my birthday. Needless to say I was ecstatic, and 7 months later I'm still playing with it. ...insert cruel joke here ... So... although it's not exactly a classic toy, it sort of is, and I couldn't have been more happy about it!
Megatron is teh ghey
Hasbro had a sale recently on board games and I picked up Mousetrap to play with my 5 and 3 year old children. I remember loving that game as a kid, and they get a real kick out of it too. PayDay was another favorite, because of the funny business names and taglines on the cards. Who can forget/resist getting three friends' worth of track together and stringing a matchbox raceway down the stairs and out the door to see how far they'd fly, a-la FoxTrot?
drink beer, and let the water run the mill
The classic wooden cars, trains, tops, etc. Find them at lots of different places, from large chain craft stores (Michael's, Hobby Lobby maybe) to flea markets, or make it yourself if you're handy. Big on imagination, fairly indestructible, can be used as chew toys for younger siblings.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
They didn't have them for home when I was young but I sure pumped enough quarters into the machines that I could have owned 'em all! Buy one of those cheap NAMCO type joystick boxes for the TV. (Bestbuy has them) Grab some rechargable batteries and plug it in. Pacman, Ms Pacman, Gallaga, etc. etc. I can still remember playing all of them for the first time and being awe-struck. Sure, they will not blow away the kids but you can show 'em how it's done!! I know that you can dload ROMS and build your own cabinets etc. but this is a cheap, simple way to get the kids playing some of the arcade video games which we all grew up with.. (Well, not all of us..)
Legos are pretty classic toys, and I like that they come in different themes. One of these days, when I'm old and gray and have nothing better to do, I'll buy a 100,000 square foot warehouse and fill it with all kinds of legos. And then I'll sit in the middle of my enormous piles of the stuff and wonder what the hell to do with it all. Ok, maybe I won't do that after all.
Bah, you had it easy.
In my day, we had to chisel the blocks from a tree to build our Start Trek base.
And we liked it.
Pre-video toy shooting gallery. BBs and a rapid fire machine gun shooting arcade clowns and ducks rather than Halo 2 and Doom threats.
Not the toys (Mattle, etc.) but the original '60's versions like Aurora. There is still quite a large group of enthusiasts, many scales, and highly collectible (HO is still my favorite; Playing Mantis/Johhny Lightning has released a brand new chassis/bodies in HO) among many others.
Yes, Slots are always problematic for young kids, both mechanically and fine motor skills, but rebuilding, modifying, and racing something with real motors/brushes that you rewound and hopped up can be fun.
Why are we promoting the idea of talking about Christmas before Thanksgiving? Perhaps we should stop and think about that for a while, and maybe this should have been posted on black friday instead?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Walmart sells $50 beinnger guitars, which I wish I would have gotten oh-so-long ago when I was a kid. But I did get a harmonica once, and kazoos and tambourines can keep kids busy forever. (Though, these are less than quite gifts.)
It's SLINKY, it's SLINKY, its fun for girls and for boys....
Principles of potential and kinetic engery are explored all the while facinating youngsters and adults...at least until the god damn think kinks and then doesn't work for shit.
WTF? Over?
I remember playing with something called "quick silver".. and it was a blast.
yes, you guessed it.... we were playing with mercury.
the stuff is cool to play with... you can take it in your hand and throw it hard at the groun and it dissappears!
(Ok creating mercury vapor and scattering 6-8 ounces of mercury all over the house was probably a bad idea.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...various ball games, holla-hoops, etc. Classic toys tend to be inexpensive, so I suggest using them to supplement modern toys such as video games.
On the other hand, I'm a believer that kneepads and elbowpads for skating/skateboarding isn't necessary until you get to the really acrobatic stuff. Yes, they'll get some nasty scrapes from time to time, but for the most part, it heals without a scar and it gives the kid a reminder not to fall next time.
And lastly, let your kids roughhouse. Tussling as a child taught me a lot about how to fall and how to react to an attack. We occasionally wound up with the odd bruise or scrape, but it healed and bad feelings seldom festered between me and my brothers. ^_^ Then again, from an early age, we were sparring with boffer weapons. Lastly, I'm a firm believer in letting your kids wander about the neighborhood without supervision, but then again, I grew up in a fairly suburban area with next to no crime and a lot of friendly neighbors.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
'Item not to be used by uncertified members of Boston Police Department.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I can describe the hinge if anyone wants me to, but I'd be very surprised if we didn't ALL "invent" it when we were growing up.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Gotta thrown the Seamonkeys in there. :)
Is it me, or is it getting harder and harder to find fun buckets of just blocks. No themes, no final goal of build X, just blocks.
The buckets I've seen in my area don't as nifty as the buckets I remember as a kid, the piece count is less, the cost is more.
And as a plus, buckets of legos weren't geared toward any specific gender. Blocks were blocks. Open the lid and build away.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Hah! Good point. Risk always did seem to end that way especially since the end game has more to d with timing than anything else. At least an hour later you could probably talk to your friends again ... unlike Diplomacy.
Diplomacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game) Now here is a game that will lose you friends. Simultaneous moves, social interaction and high-stakes negotiations. With Gamers. A recipe for destruction.
I have a friend who still recounts to people (who are rolling on the floor laughing) about getting chased around the room with a knife after he negotiated the sabotage and destruction of another player.
Classic.
This is a good starter set for the young ones. Just basic bricks, slopes and plates, and at 1.5 cents per piece, it's as cheap as Lego comes.
I plan to buy a bunch of these at Xmas for the charity bin at the front of the store.
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!).
Your kid won't do any of the experiments in the booklet but combining a wide range of chemicals to make bizarre sludge is worth something in its own right.
cardboard & styrofoam -- reprazent!
Buy a couple of these and put them in the holiday charity bin at the front of the store - some future Slashdotter will thank you!
My 20 gauge shotgun never gets old. Kids will always love explosions, therefer they will always love guns. Knives are also a definate keeper.
doug
-a.thought.crushed.my.mind-
Every kid needs a Little Red Wagon
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
The Sit 'n Spin was the source of many a vomit stain in my basement. Maybe I should make my own and relive the good ol' days...
Who am I to blow against the wind? -- Paul Simon
Heck, I'm 25 and just stumbled across this website and renewed my love for Legos. I'm pretty sure my parents still have a big @ss Rubbermaid tub of my Legos at home, so I decided to take an extra, empty suitcase when I go home for Thanksgiving so I could cart some of them back with me.
I'm looking forward to a couple of evenings re-assembling all my sets and getting the replacement bricks!
Rivetron was great, but they had a recall due to the choking hazard from the rubber rivets. It was easier to remove the rivets with your teeth than with the tool they provided. Mom made me take it back after she seen me with about 15 rivets between my teeth.
Tried and true, little children usually 4 or less are more interested in the packaging the gift comes more so than the gift itself. I bought a child a big stuffed animal in a box and they played with the box for the next week before they took a second glance at the bear.
^_^ Indeed! My grandfather made me a set when I was a child and they're still in use by my younger siblings. Nice varnished hardwood, gorgeous looking things. Only thing is, I'd warn any parent getting blocks for their kids that kids figure out that blocks make excellent projectiles early on and some of them have amazing arms on them as well as unerring accuracy...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I was very very shocked not to see an erectorset...
e ct orset.htm
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/er
It depends on the age of your children (I hope, anyway) but get a big box from a local store. Or even go all out and *buy* a box from UPS or FedEx. Endless free-to-cheap entertainment.
The greatest toy a child can have is is or her own imagination. Remember to fuel it with plenty of books, though.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
you insensitive clod! Oh wait, this isn't a poll...
Kids today are far too coddled. They need to play in weed-infested vacant lots where they can get a chance to play with rusty pieces of metal, weathered 2x4s with nails in them, and construction debris.
I remember dog crap playing a big part in street play in my childhood. No one picked up after their dogs back then, nor leashed them. Dog crap could be hurled at other kids, or rubbed into item which were then handed, all innocent-like, to other kids. At the Fourth of July, toys loaded with both fireworks and dog crap were a source of excitement and an incentive to great speed and agility.
To heck with your Gameboy Advances and LEGO Star Wars Episode VII sets. An old washing machine can with a little imagination serve as a time machine, and a discarded refrigerator makes a SWELL gas chamber for the final scene in Cops n' Robbers games and that actually kind of works for real!
Stefan
'nuf said.
Available at Amazon
A little more "Lego-like" but still all the fun (and a little bit of the danger) of playing with electricity.
I collect them in 55 gallon drums in my backyard!
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
"Snap Circuits" are a similar concept which my kid has had some fun with. No springs, like the old 200-in-1 kits, but a variety of large, easily manipulated pieces you snap together to connect. Some projects are fun, some teach electronics. Go for one of the larger kits (at least the 200 modes) if you want any kind of variety.
Be sure to visit for all your buy a single Lego piece needs.
Fellowship 9/11
1976 Mattel Space 1999 Eagle 1 - http://www.space1999.net/~catacombs/main/merc/eagl e/mattel_big_eagle_small_writeup.htm
That, combined with the Six Million Dollar Man "rocket" and the Star Trek Bridge playset and the Space 1999 Moonbase Alpha playset would entertain me for hours.
And I think my parents kept all that stuff as well.
Neurowiz
HOT WHEELS ! and the tons of orange track with loops, jumps and 180 degree turns. I owned a Hot Heap. My favorite. Lost every race in race. Aerodynamics was way over my head.
Zeroids (four mobile robots with spring loaded launchers)
Well, for one, it really was kind of a fad. As more of an expanded answer, Duncan damn near bankrupted themselves by selling too many units back when they had the wooden yo-yos (As orders mounted, getting the good wood was more and more costly) allowing for the cheap plastic crap to compete. After a while, people started equating yo-yos with the plast ones. But yeah, yo-yos used to be one of the standard gifts at elementary school parties for me. My mother had found a large amount of Duncan yo-yos at bulk pricing, so they became standard gifts for us. That and, for a long time, those little sun-catcher things where you have a metal frame and some crystals, then cook it in your microwave.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Bag 'O Broken Glass
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
Here in the UK, Hornby has just launched a live steam model of the Flying Scotsman in OO gauge. At 500UKP though, it's probably aimed more at dads with disposable income, which is just as well unless you want to burden your kids for life with the stigma of railway enthusiasm.
/
Ade_
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
It's still around. As good as ever. The kids will beat the caffeine-addled grownups every time.
Big Wheels ruled. You can get moved pretty fast on them, yank the brake and spin out. The kid gets some exercise, spends some time outside, and even the wee ones can use them.
Gets a little tough when the plastic front wheel gets bald and your driveway has an incline, but nothing a running start can't get you past.
Your time.
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
About the only Christmas present I remember from my childhood is the 2300AD sci-fi rpg I got. Me and my friends played it for 5 years or so.
And I remember having so much fun with it, being a gamekeeper and creating adventures for other players. *Sniff*
And then there was one holiday when I got a wood burning kit... :)
It'd give anyone in the educational establishment today an aneurysm. Needless to say, if I ever actually manage to reproduce, my kids will be getting a good healthy dose of those subversive recipes...
Hmm... I should see if the copyright's expired. That'd be a good one to put in Project Gutenberg.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not sure if its still around for sale but my favorite is the teddy rumpskin, rupskin? something like that. it was a bear that you put a tape in his back and his lips move with "the story". i always thought it was fun to put recordings of my dads porno on to audio tape and watch his lips move with it. sometimes i kind of liked it to much..........
Giggidy Giggidy Gigg-a-dy
Probably my favourite, because I solved it by myself, and it wasn't completely trivial (like the Missing Link.)
The original spud guns were mostly popular back in the 60s but have always been around since but rarely seen. I have occasionally seen them advertised since then in catalogs.
The original models were pretty cheaply made and I remember mine falling apart. Also, my parents weren't too happy when they found potato pieces all over the porches, sidewalks and yard.
I did a quick search on google and found many sites that sell them by either the name spud gun or potato gun. There's also countless sites on making your own. Here's a site that sells one: http://grandpasgeneral.com/k-pgun.html
The Truth About Slashdot
Who didn't love playdoh? Better than legos - you could form it into the shapes you wanted, and it tasted great!
...you forgot to sign off with your customary:
:-P
"K-Mart sucks!" sig...
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
I think if Lego wants to increase their profits, they should drop *everything* in their current product line, then go back to, say, 1987, and reissue every set from that year. Next year, they can do 1988 etc. I'd buy a lot more Lego if they did this.
I think the decline of lego began when the first glut of star wars sets were released-- sure, the first ones they did were surprisingly good, but it set a precedent for future years(meaning right now). I don't think I've bought any new Lego since 2000 or so, but I have made several purchases at Bricklink, which is sort of an eBay for Lego.
There was an Erector Set, lots of girders and nuts and bolts and stuff. Even an engine.
My Chemistry set. I still remember what color you get when you mix Ferric Ammonium Sulfate and Tannic Acid! I remember starting to play with it Christmas afternoon, and my Mom insisted that my Dad sit in the room with me, I assume to make sure I didn't blow anything up. He sat there reading the whole time, only looking up when I said "Hey Dad! Look! I can pour this into this and it turns blue!"
My first Microscope. I forget the name of the set, it was a set of cardboard tubes, and lenses you could plug into either end. It worked great, and I remember Dad giving up a drop of blood so that we could take a look at it.
Kids today.. yeah, Gamecubes are cool, but they don't know what they're missing.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
fire.
melting stuff never goes out of style
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Also fun was the board game Stratego, but it's been difficult to find recently, at least for me (I no longer have my copy).
One buddy (same group as I referred to in Risk) now refuses to ever play Diplomacy again. He lost it and destroyed multiple CD cases and half the damn board when we gang raped his Turkish ass.
--trb
I'll be buying my 21 month old son Tinker Toys and a Tonka truck for Christmas. I'll go with the wood Tinker Toys but I'll stick with plastic for the truck at least for another couple of years.
And man are TinkerToys hard to find now. They don't carry them at Target. One of the places I have found them is Cracker Barrel restaurant.
One humuna humuna humna...
Two humuna humuna humna...
Three humuna humuna humna...
Enjoy!
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
subject says it all.
Every 8-12yr old should have a *GOOD* yo-yo. Builds hand-eye coordination. No batteries. Get some books from the library and learn some easy tricks. Fits in your pocket, carry it anywhere and play when you get a few moments.
Make sure you also provide extra strings!
I remember when I was a kid, I was babysitting for my neighbors who had a rubix cube. The dad solved it back in his college days. Anyway, I decided to see how much I could mess it up and be able to solve it again. Needless to say, I found the answer.
He was pretty upset when he came back and saw his cube all messed up. But I went online and found a site that someone made where you type in the configuration of your cube, and it gives you step-by-step instructions on how to solve it.
I fixed it back to how it used to be and he couldn't believe it. Thought I was some kind of genius or something.
=)
Check out a pretty good listing of construction toys here. I love Lego, of course, by Erector is a close follower. My personal favorite, though, is the much-neglected and rather underrated Capsela -- quirky plastic capsules with surprising possibilities (working pontoon swamp boat, anyone?)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
My wife and I spent 5 years on a 32 foot sailboat cruising around the Pacific with our two children (a girl 2-1/2 when we left and a boy who was born along the way). There is not much room for extras on a 32-foot sailboat but there was enough room for books and for legos. Our daughter would make elaborate constructions from her legos while we were anchored or in a port but then we would have to break them up and store them away when we went out to sea again. She hated this but there was no alternative if we didn't want things flying around the boat underway (you would be AMAZED at the amount of motion in a sailboat at sea... we had bruises everywhere). Then, safe in the next anchorage, she'd make something even better. Really, all the toy a kid needs because with legos and an imagination they can make almost any toy. But I would advise you to buy the standard legos and not the themed sets because the kids can do more with the regular blocks.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Wooden blocks, cut from different kinds of hardwoods with nontoxic natural finish. Blocks are fun to build with and nice to just handle. They stay crisp and crunchy in milk, too, and stand up to attempted eating. One can also get more exotic shapes than rectangular parallelopipeds. Blocks are very safe, except when I used to play with them. I made a T, with a long narrow block standing on its small face, and then built a structure atop the crosspiece. Then I waited for nature to take its course.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
If you're even close to any woods at all, a Christmas hatchet is a right to manhood for any young boy.
Nothing says hours of outdoors fun like being able to cut down anything in sight.
Weren't we all promised flying cars and hovercrafts when we grew up?
I bought one for $3 from Edmund Scientific, but my 3-year-old cousin stepped on it.
Well, they still make them, probably from the same vacuum mold.
I got a 3-pack, since the shipping was the same. Buy it now.
I always had fun on my American Flyer
:-)
;-)
Now, an updated version for 'kids nowadays'
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
The best part was that I could make buildings that were large enough to be useful (wood has that special property :) )
Later on, my parents got my younger siblings a set of cardboard blocks. The blocks were about 12" x 6" x 3". There were enough that we could actually make little houses and forts, and strong enough to hold our weight. Of course we could also hurl them at each other while hiding behind walls made of the same. That was pretty cool, since the blocks weighed enough to knock out portions of the opponents wall but not enough to cause any serious damage to the basement. It was a little like real-life space invaders
--- There are two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it
Here it is. My kids are still fascinated by this (come to think of it, so am I). Just how fast can you make it go before the wheel flies right off or you get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Well, algorithmic deficiency isn't my problem. "True" and "True with my unstated constraints" are two very different things.
I don't remember if the specific, branded Rubiks had only a single colour combination or not. I know I've owned a bunch of more-generic cubes in which there was a lot of variation on which colours were adjacent to each other. (I've seen 'em with a totally different colour palette for example)
Besides, any such algorithm should be trivially capable of being told the relative orientation of the center pieces and solve from there. If it can't, it's deficient.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm buying myself a new Virus.
Common sense is not so common.
If you give a youngster a BB gun, you've got to be there when he uses it and make sure he understands the damage he can do. Make sure to impress upon him that he must think through all the consequences of its use each time he fires. Give examples: don't fire up into the air, don't fire in a direction such that if you miss you might hit someone, don't shoot pets, don't shoot mommy's flowers, etc..
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
http://schwinnstingray.com/
The newer ones seemed to be cheaper made than the ones of old...lighter, cheaper plastic. I liked the original much better than the Football 2 they put out. The baseball one was pretty fun too...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That's an opinion based upon the facts of the case as highlighted by slashdot in a previous story! Not a ffriggin' troll. I was genuinely trying to set the guy straight.
Crissakes, some people....
I had a die-cast metal gyroscope when I was a kid. One day I wound 15 feet of fishing line onto it, tied the end to a door knob and ran accross the room. I no sooner had put it on the floor when it started making this freakish humm - before I could reflect on the drawbacks of overclocking my Gyroscope it shattered and the spokes shot off in all directions - including two into my lower legs drawing blood. Some stuck into a pine bench accross the room, and some into the wall. Awesome - I'll never forget that. I think it must have been like starting the first nuclear chain reaction... "how high can we rev this sucker?"
I had one of these little wooden toys during my alpha version stage and it was WONDERFUL.
Jacob's Ladder history
-optimus prime, megatron, and soundwave.
-MASK boulder mountain
-castle greyskull & extra ooze
they don't make them anymore?!?
they SHOULD, dammit!
seriously tho,
-a bad-ass sled
-slip-n-slide (for those with warm xmas's)
-hotwheels (are micro-machines still around?)
-anything nerf or super-soaker (nerf fencing was my fav)
How many different Nerf things were there, anyway?
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Uncle Milton's Ant Farm (the ones with green frames). Ants are educational and fun to watch. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine how paint would apply in this situation.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Squeeze em till they bleed.....
In George Bush's America I imagine that the number #1 Christmas gift for most of us will be almost adequate food to eat and Good Christian Cheer. The wealthy, "MY Base - haw haw" will as always, get slaves.
Girls love 'em too!
Lego put out a pink set a few years back that didn't do all that well. Not because girls don't play with them, but Legos are non-gender-specific.
When you throw in a good dose of primary colors you add artistic value. Or suggest a "blue only ______" this adds mathmatical (sorting) skills.
I had a microscope and a telescope when I was a kid and I remember them being the coolest things I owned. A microscope or a telescope will introduce a child to a whole new world that they can't see on their own. They may even get to wondering about other aspects of life that they can't directly interact with or see with their naked eyes (e.g. how a tree works).
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
Yeah, that's right - the original personal robot. Forget RoboSapien, you want Mr. Machine.
I, for one, welcome our plastic robot overlords....
And most importantly - imagine a beowolf cluster of Mr. Machines.
if the packaging (or the cube itself) said "rubiks" on it anywhere you might have a point.
Maybe you do0 have a point - either way I consider the action to have been unreasonable. The point of IP laws is to have things invented and made and eventually enter the public domain whilst allowing for reward of the inventor. In this case the inventor made many millions or dollars over at least 20 years - they've had their state mandated monopoly.
I agree that it's silly to scream about the Homeland security agents though, clearly it is their jurisdiction and paranoia about that is just silly.
Honestly, it was one of those impulse things. I periodically link random things in an effort to keep hyperlinks relevant. Eh, my sister can handle herself, I figure.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
ok, so many people have probally said this already, but, what the heck?
LEGO!!!!!!
i still build stuff with it. it's fun and something to keep my hands busy when there isn't a computer available and there's nothing good on TV(which is almost 24 hours a day)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
How about an miniture steam engine???
No greater gift for a young child, although it would be good for his 7th birthday too.
I hear ya. It seems kids today are almost forced to be such 'weenies'. No competitive sports..at least early on. No dodge ball (how in the world does THIS hurt self esteem?). Helmets for bikes? That sure would make it difficult to jump the over the big dirt pile in the neighbors yard over 4 of your friends laying underneath...while playing Evel Knieval...
We made our first skate boards out of old metal roller skates and a 2x4...and went flying down large hills. When we got store bought ones...we stole wood from the nearby house construction sites and built big ramps at the end of the streets. Hell...we used to take off on our bikes all day long in the summer...just had to call home every 2-3 hours from a neighbors house to check in. Hell, now, kids don't seem to play outside at all. When did things get so PC when it comes to kids. Why did we take away all the fun things we could do? Sure, got some scrapes and scratches...broke my arm once at the skatepark when our town got one...but, survived, have great memories, and still have long term friends from the old neighborhoods made surviving these things back then.
I don't think I've been driving through a neighborhood in years, and seen a bunch of kids in a front yark playing kill the man with the ball ..sigh...I guess someone would get sued over it today...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have the US and the Japanese version is enroute as we speak >:)
A good choice, still available if you so choose. My sister has a couple tins hidden in her Xmas supplies, just in case one of her rugrats really deserves something special one year.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
My parents were very careful to get us mostly "classic" toys when we were kids - lots of construction sets. Legos, Robotix, Capsela, Construx, lots of stuff where you could let your imagination run wild and create whatever toy you wanted. This went hand-in-hand with Lionel trains, and pretty much anything with a German name that was made out of wood. (Brio, anyone?) They also strictly limited our TV time, didn't get cable, and encouraged us to pursue a myriad of interests to give us a wide range of hobbies and experience.
So what happened? Instead of going to college and studying Computer Science, I decided to try a liberal arts major in English and study a wide variety of subjects. Now I can't get a job and in all probability will die peniless and alone in the gutter. Want my advice? Buy them a McDonald's Play Restaurant Set and teach them to hang drywall. Trust me, they'll thank you in the long run.
The original Civilization on floppies.
It's funny. Laugh.
I am a bit younger than most who post on here, but K'Nex is another exciting toy that fosters creative and engineerng skills. I remember just building lots of planes that would bomb the crap out of unsuspective people below (yes i actually made K'Nex bombs my planes would carry).
I really miss my BigTrak (I think thats how you spell it). 10m forward, right 40 degrees, forward 5m. Shit batteries died. Awesome toy. Bring them back I say
A great toy, but a little difficult to find in the US these days. ...or as a friend suggested: get him a gun and yourself some body armor for some family fun!
Milhouse:
Rember Alf? Well he's back....in pog form.
Spirograph taught me that I could create art through mathematical principles. Actually, I didn't know why it worked, but thought the resulting drawings were cool.
I loved my "Dr. Nim" from E.S.R. which I had in the mid-1960s. I would have loved to have had an "DigiComp I" or "DigiComp II" also from the same company.
Toys like "Erector" (or "Meccano") and "Tinker-Toy" were always appreciated as were science toys like chemistry and electronics kits. The "All-in-one" was cool too (it had a telescope, a microscope, a compass, a mirror, and other stuff in a Swiss Army Knife sort of package).
Another toy I liked was the "Whizzer" which was gyroscope in a top.
shotgun
I've been noticing that Wal-Mart's been carrying less and less of the Lego inventory, and what they do carry is Bionicle and Harry Potter, not so much the Designer sets. A customer looking at the meager space allocated to Lego might not even realize that you can still buy good stuff online. Our local toy stores also started carrying less, and now I only buy online for lack of any other useful source. (We actually considered opening our own Lego store!) I don't think Lego entirely did it to itself, I think its retailers also participated. Lego's doing better, they're giving up on franchise themes and moving toward purely Designer sets (bad name, sadly) and buckets of bricks. The sad part is that it might be too late, that retailers and customers will never trust them enough again to carry and buy their products like they once did. Considering the others toys I see for sale at Wal-Mart in particular, I see that as a terrible disservice to kids growing up right now -- they'll wind up with one-use crap that won't teach them anything but violence and greed. (Maybe I'm too harsh, but the classic boys/girls toys really just seem that way to me.)
What they should do is bring back the Blacktron Lego series. They were my favorite of all types of lego pieces as a kid. With several of those sets you had a lot of pieces from which to make just about any kind of vehicle you wanted. Everything from galaxy class starships, low-altitude flyers, moon-rovers, battle tanks - I came up with tons of my own designs. I made fun of the kids who only played with "castle lego", that crap was for babies.
In communist Poland, it was nice to get toilet paper for a change, instead of having to use newspapers. Black and white were ok, but the color glossy ones were too thick and slippery.
Oh yes. And for the interested parents I recommend some Holldöbler & Wilson (1991).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
http://www.realdoll.com/
magic, happy, floppy
No, it doesn't. It raises the question. Petitio Principii, as it is called in Latin, or 'begging the question' in English, is circular reasoning: assuming that which is to be proven.
This is not rocket science. It's the sort of thing one learns in any semi-decent grade school. Sheesh.
That said, this Christmas I'm hoping to receive a sweater or two--it's indeed sad when one gets so old that the dreaded gifts of one's youth are looked forward to.
My grandparents threatened their kids with the story where if they didn't behave then Santa would leave them a 'bundle of switches' instead of toys in their stockings.
My uncle (now an engineer) said he never understood the threat, always thought it would be really cool to get some switches in his stocking...
ERECTOR SET Despite what you might say I am younger than Thiry, I had one when I was a kid (no Legos) they were fun. Also if you have dexterity issues erector creations tend to be easier to handle because they are bolted together if you fumble your creation it won't smash into 1000 pieces when it hits the floor. Also what about Capsula (sp) that was a pretty neat building toy as well. Between those two you should get a good mechanical engineer out of the deal...
Respect man.
Your trolling powers are on a class of their own.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
..no discussion would be complete without the ability to draw this stuff -
MLCAD
LDraw
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
Toy trains, of course. Unfortunately, in US the toy market got screwed up the same way as any other market - the manucfacturers flooded it with worthless crap in order to push the real toys into the upscale "model" market. For this reason you'll have to pay a pretty penny for a real toy train set, but IMHO it is worth it.
We only did it once, but it was great fun. That is til we punched a hole in the garage roof.
Yep, but that book is too technical. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was obsessed with Star Wars when I was a kid and had a shitload of figures. When I got older it was Transformers and GI Joe. Boys will always love Action figures, so long as there a cool franchises to base them on. oh yeah model kits a fun too.
So Legos are like breasts, huh? Made for the children but Daddy gets to play with them anyway?
going to hell now...
I rarely go religiously through all the thread, but I did this time (I am orphaned tonight, so have lots of time on my hands).
The list of industrialized toys of all kind is very telling to somebody with a different cultural background (most people are USians here).
Some mentioned yo-yo, but not s single person mentioned simpler toys:
-Marbles. I spent unncountable hours playing with marbles, organizing tournaments against my friends, winning and lossing marbles in bets, and then building tracks for them with all kinds of materials to roll and roll and roll.
- Did you guys have trompos?
- What about baleros?
-Roller skates?
The most telling thing is that nobody mentioned a ball of any kind. Being Mexican I played with footballs most of my childhood to emulate the heros of the most popular sport in the world, but basketball and even volleyball where all close to my heart. Few things were more appreciated in Xmas time than a football, but most importantly a match with teams formed by uncles, cousins and the odd girl in the extended family after Xmas day brunch.
You guys north of the Rio Bravo, did not mention a bat and a baseball, a pitcher's glove, and US football ball, if there are any UKians, not a single cricket bat?
If somebody would have wanted a thread to highlight a geeky stereotype, this would be the one: mechanical contraptions, electronic gadgetry, all branded and commercialized, simplicity and physical activity sorely missing in the image that geeks have of chilhood's pleasures.
But perhaps this is also telling of the culture of fear permeating US society (fear of lawsuits, feel of being harmed)...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't know if it will work, but I plan on giving the kids viewmasters and seeing if I can cut down on the gameboy and leappad batteries.
Apparently, not everything is coming up Milhouse.
When I was younger, every kid's must have transportation device was the Big Wheel. But you were even cooler if you owned the Green Machine. And I noticed that the Green Machine was re-introduced this year and is available at Toys R Us.
. ht ml
http://www.huffybikes.com/products/greenmachine
Sort of a cross between lego/tinker/erector. Plastic cubes with one hinged side, four sides having holes, two sides with pegs. The hinged detail made for more dynamic creations. Also had steel axles and toothed wheels that resembled tires but would mesh like gears. Made some neato whirly-gig contraptions, lunar rover clones, alien masks with articulated features, etc....
When i was a kid all i got for christmas was a lump of coal and a kick up the arse.
I thought the kick up the arse does not derive from MP? Rather, it was a seasonal gift distributed within the Bacon family?
I think it was invented by a swiss mathemetician.
But its my favorite all-time puzzle.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
A really neat mechanical robotic arm. A classic!!
Last Christmas I asked for some distentanglement puzzles - the kind where you have to remove the ring without bending, breaking or cutting the rest of the puzzle etc. There are a bunch of different puzzles of varying difficulty, so there's something for everyone.
A few years ago, I got some "Stack-a-Roos" - a box of eight wooden kangaroos roughly two inches tall and two inches wide; a friend has a different set with five or size different sized and shaped kangaroos, and I've seen one with different animals. The object is simple enough - stack them in any way you like! The shape of the blocks is quite cunning so that they hook together (sometimes precariously), so you get can make some pretty crazy stacks. I'm sure there's something equivalent where you live.
...okay, so I'm showing my age... If you clicked on this you're an old fart too...
Always one of our favorite playthings when we were kids. They made a nice compliment to model cars/rockets and legos too.
I only ever got playmobile when i was a kid for the trains. They were the first model trains i have, and they were what got me interested in them. I stil have all my playmobile, and i've upgraded to proper model trains now...
Waffles rock.
How about a rubik cube that automatically scrambles and solves the puzzle fifty times a minute, while belching green smoke, leaking ectoplasm and chanting
"melborp a deretnuocne sah swodniw...."
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Daisy released a special collectors-edition Red Ryder BB gun to piggy-back on the Christmas Story fad.
My dad got one for me for my birthday. When I was like, 32.
He was still coming home drunk 5 days a week at this point. It wasn't as bizarre or outrageous a gift as the toddler's Mickey Mouse bowling set I got when I was 14, so I counted myself lucky.
Still, I had absolutely no interest in it, so I stuck it in a closet.
I imagine it might be worth money, someday, which could be handy paying for therapy.
I hope they are still made from the good stuff.
You mean Tonka-tough steel? Better be. I don't hold with playing with dumptrucks made out of bronze.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Simply the best construction toy ever. Build
skyscrapers, bridges, roads - all sorts of stuff.
You can still get sets put together from bits by
various collectors, but they are hard to come by.
I wish someone would bring that one back!
If the person the gift is being bought for has any interest in Space or Rockets, buying them a model rocket kit is a great way to encourage that.
Oh wait...
Using model rockets will lead to the ATF comming after you for using an "illegal explosive device" without a licence.
for Mr. Happy
I always liked my Capsela sets, although I don't know if children still play with this.
Lego and Mechano are my favorites I remember as a kid in the 70's. Lego these days is pretty crap as they come in very small packs that are made to build a stupid little space ship or some thing. In the 70's it came in a bucket where you had hundreds of the same type of block and you could make anything you could imagine. Radio Shack electronic kits and chemistry sets were also cool but I never used to stray too much from the examples in the books. Lego and Mechano definately expand your mind to a greater extent.
Now, since I just got to work, and hence just online to see this story, it's a pretty good piece of the way down and no one may ever even read this. Also, I skimmed, searched and read most of what's here and there is a toy missing that I feel needs to be highlighted.
That toy? M.A.S.K. The Mobile Armored Strike Kommand. (Hey, it had to be K to fit with the acronym, poor spelling skills be damned). As a child I skrimped and saved my allowance and pretty much had the entire toy line. Sure, it meant I couldn't buy He-Man or even G.I.Joe most of the time. But who needed them when you had M.A.S.K.?
With all the revisiting the 80's toy lines, including Star Wars (all of them) and Master of the Universe, it's curious to me that M.A.S.K. hasn't been similarly resurrected. For those too old or too young to remember the toy line, let me put on my "When I was your age..." cap and begin to knit my yarn.
The entire toy line was based on real vehicles. It was, I guess in a way, our answer to the Japanese invasion of Transformers. Instead of robots, however, the M.A.S.K. vehicles all transformed into massive vehicles of battle. All covered with weaponry, death and destruction. Did the combatants end there though? No. They each also had a helmet, or MASK, that was also itself a weapon and each one had it's own individual power. Not unlike a nod to the huge comic property of superheroes in the day. Some even came with hand held weapons. These toys were just ready to take out the world.
On further introspection, maybe I can see why it hasn't been resurrected, however He-Man certainly has massive amounts of weaponry as well. G.I.Joe is most openly a military body ..... any way, I digress.
Now, while I'm geek enough to remember each of the vehicles, weapons, drivers, and masks in turn. I will not bore you with those details. But I will hit highlights of the back story surrounding the toy line and a grand overview of the vehicles involved.
Matt Trakker, leader of the forces of M.A.S.K. and on the side of light and good, came by his weaponry from his brother, Andy. His brother had been partners with Miles Mayhem, leader of the forces of V.E.N.O.M. (The Vicious and Evil Network Of Mayhem) who together found the crystals that powered all the devices in the series. Andy knew that Miles was getting ready to pull something, and built a second series of masks and hid them for Matt to find.
Then we get into the standard cliche villian plot. Miles wanted to take over the world and to that end had hundreds of schemes that Matt and M.A.S.K. were always there to thwart.
This toy line touched it all (at least for a boy) It gave you cars to "drive," figures that could get into the cars. Cars that transformed into weapons platforms. Back story to relive battles with the toy line. Interchangable components. (The masks were removeable, and could fit different figures, etc. Unlike some toys even today where they are basically cast plastic figurines that don't even move ..... toy my eye.) Superhero like powers. Really cool villians to fight (I mean come on, Stink Man? [He-Man Villian])
*sighs* Ah well .... and look at the DVD run of items coming out. Knight Rider, Munsters, Strawberry Shortcake?? .... and yet, still no M.A.S.K. love ..... truely a forgotten artifact of the past. Now all we need is Indiana Jones to help us find it!
Thanks for letting me ramble about the past
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
To play with on the street with your friends.
-not that I want more people on bricklink, the other thingy... reissue sets!
We played many variations of it.
One variation was that you had to turn your flag around. Or your 1 and 2's.
Another was you set up your side and then flip the board so the other guy has to play your setup. Only rules was that you couldn't surround the flag with bombs. Flag had to be on back row. One space had to be open up front.
It's a great game. Can be demoralizing.
Lawn darts. Poke around in your grandparent's attic. Worlds of fun.
These things are totally cool. Would love to find one for my four year old daughter. It's the perfect toy: QUIET!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Lots and lots of dildos, the toys that keep on giving, and giving, and OH OH OH GIVING...
I used to have several toys with between 6 and 50 plastic gears. The toys were meant to be pulled apart and put back together. I particularly remember a helicopter and a clock.
Heh... my father and I pulled a similar trick. We found one that seemed to be particularly well balanced at the store and took it to his machine shop. This was one of the spoked ones not these new smooth plastic wheeled ones.
:}
Anyways... So you take an air hose from the compressor and aim it so that it pushes on the spokes. About 45 seconds of this and you are quite sure you no longer wish to be holding the gyro. We set it on the floor and watched in amazement as it went 13+ minutes without even wiggling... about a minute later it finally fell over totally.
We tried getting a tachometer reading on it but could never get anything reflective enough to stick. If only we would have thought of shiny paint.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
I used to play with a cartesian diver - the instructions for which can be found here: at hasbro
This was a great toy, simple concept but tricky to use to pick up treasure.
Has anyone seen anything like it in use today.
Oh - and of course there was always trick-track, for those of you over 40...
Get your motor running, head out on the hi-way, looking for adventure, and.. perhaps I'll just hack some perl first..
King Ding was just one of the Ding-a-Ling robots, there were different ones. Never had a new one but as a kid I did get my mits on one from a Salvation Army (I was thrifting as a kid, never stopped!)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I posted a question to Slashdot about Low Tech Toys last Christmas. I sure got the runaround at the stores. But I did find them online thanks to the post.
How about transistor radio kits. I got one when I was a kid and still wish I had actually made it. I think I broke something, then gave up. Or if you're REALLY cool, you can get a Russian transistor radio kit: http://www.tompolk.com/radios/russian.html
Cool
Chemistry Set (my brother had this)
Erector Set (loads of fun and minor cuts)
Creepy Crawlers (back during the hot-plate era; burnt fingers anyone?)
Hydrodynamics Experiments Set (never owned one but saw an old one recently, pretty different and interesting)
Electronics Experiments Set (circuits and build your own radio/motor etc.)
Office Building/skyscraper playset (white and clear wall panels, and snap-together beams, pretty interesting)
Computer planning models (you know like those ones the IBM sales rep used) never had one but looks like it would be a good boy companion to sis' Barbie set.
Matchbox, Hotwheel and Corgi toys especially the articulated fire engine with the extending ladder.
Wood Burning Set (no nned to comment on the potential flesh/home burning potential)
Die-cast Midevil seige weapondry (don't know who made them but really fun)
Legos (ah, I remember as a kid the refreshing feel of the 2x2 brick corners stabbing into my bare feet in the middle of the night)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
It was great when Hot Wheels and Matchbox used to coexist, as different companies, as they were completely different takes on the miniature diecast car idea. It was almost like a version of Ford vs. Chevy played out in miniature!
;). They also were of more consistent relative size compared to each other, and just a little bigger than Hotwheels.
When Lesney created the first Matchbox car (sometime in the 1940's I think) in England, it was a revolutionary idea. The vehicles were somewhat crudely made, with thin wheels that freely wobbled about think axles, and no interiors to speak of, but they were tough and durable. They also were pretty small, and in fact could fit in a Matchbox: hence the name.
Throughout the 50's and 60's these cars gained popularity throughout Europe, and people started bringing and them importing them to the US. The choice of vehicles was almost exclusively European, however the detail and quality of castings improved steadily over time.
When Mattel came out with Hotwheels in 1968, it was a direct attempt to capitalize and Americanize (yah, kind of redundant, I know) on the Matchbox phenomenon. Mattel made certain that their cars would be faster by using thin wire axles and thick wheels that were not quite cylindrical; indeed most Hotwheel wheels have had a slight conical essence to them as a tangential edge provides the least rolling resistance. Whereas Matchbox cars were true authentic miniatures of the real thing, Hotwheels (and then even more cartoonish Johnny Lightnings released a couple years later) were at best often just passable caricatures of real vehicles. However, Mattel set the stage by consistently keeping their product at an inexpensive price point... to this day they still do not cost more than 1 dollar... whereas Matchbox cars were a bit pricier.
This strategy paid off big time for Mattel... the American designs and "it's cheap enough for me to buy 4 of them so my damn kid will shut up" pricing helped rocket them into one of the truly genuine toy product success stories of the last century, and these colorful fast-rolling cars captured the imaginations of a generation, and continues to capture their wallets decades later.
These two philosophies reached an interesting nexus in the 70's. Now competeing directly with each other, Matchbox cars became faster with crazier paint schemes, and Hot Wheels gradually became more realistic. Yet in comparing pouplar castings done by each company from, says, 1974-1992 (such as the 57 Chevy, fastback Mustang, Porche 911, Mercedes sedans, etc) Matchbox clearly had the upper hand in terms of casting fidelity, what with defined head and taillights, molding trim, and better interiors. Hotwheels were still not as well done in most cases. Matchbox always listed the exact scale equivalent on their cars, Hotwheels have never done so. Lesney eventually started making their cars in cheaper asian plants, to compete on a cost basis with Mattel. The variety of subproduct lines was great too... with different wheels, paintjobs, and other gimmicks reglary coming out year after year. Matchbox even started the current trend of super-realism in 1/64 with their "World Class" collection of the late 1980's.
But what really made Matchbox cars the cherished choice in for me, was that fact that they had a damn good suspension! You could drive over all sorts of crap, simulate braking and cornering, or even have a rockin' good time with a van, and those wheels would always spring back to neutral! Whereas a hotwheel car became instant, nonrolling garbage as soon as you tried. My bin became filled with hotwheels where the wheels were bent under the frame, and those were the cars that eventually met their maker via sledgehammer or train...
Over time it seems that Lesney just could not compete with Mattel's economies of scale. The company went into receivership a few times starting in the 1980's, and was eventually sold to Tyco (of slot car, cheapass junky toy train, and R/C car fame) in th
Things like toy train sets, water/bathtub toys and other toys that require a lot of moving things and touching things are probably going to be with us for a long time. Video games still have almost no tactile feedback. Vibrations are a start but until you can literally feel a magnet pulling on another magnet or the buoyancy of a water toy and other forms of precise tactile-visual feedback that even adults find strangely curious and satisfying (like smacking her ass and watching her reaction) there is going to be plenty of demand for toys and kinky girlfriends.
is to take it apart and then reassemble it. you can tell if you did that with the stickers, but can't tell if you disassembed it and put it back together, you just gotta turn it a certain way.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Bring out - DARK TOWER! :)
I remember Gilbert Chemistry and Physics sets (it even had a radioactive sample and a detector) -- much fun. Also Erector Sets, Microscope, Telescope, a simple Electric construction kit from somebody (could make a telegraph, "traffic light" etc.), the Magic 8Ball, Etch-a-sketch, model cars, bags of cheap plastic army men, walkie-talkies, a gyroscope and some kind of wheel on a magnetic axle that would follow a steel hand-held frame.
Gotta have a Slinky!
I still love them; I have turned my kids on to them. I still get out the old luan plywood box and wire up a radio or a light buzzer. Way too much fun, especially today when many toys I have seen take away the electrical build-it aspects. A radio kit with a pre-built circuit board? no thanks.
I started with the 100-in-one in 1970, roughly, the 20-inone, the 60 in one, the 120-in-one (1972?), and now the 200-in-one, EBay them for cheap, and I have found them in good shape at garage sales. A little work cleaned them up and they all work.
The biggest problem with them seemed to be that they put no support under the cardboard, causing them to sink in. Careful removal and placement of styro peanuts and the problem is solved.
My genitals!
1) Magic kits are a lot of fun. Coordination, timing...all that.
2) "Operation" was another great game.
3) "Jenga" is a more recent favorite (even though it's ancient, I first saw it only in the last 10-15 years.)
4) Playing cards (and maybe a couple rule books) are great if you ever are having gender-gap communication problems.
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
I've played all of two live games of this. The tension when you have a full board is amazing. Both ended badly, and I seriously saw the begginings of a divorce during one. Wouldn't trade the experience for anything!
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
If we are making a list of what we geeks want for christmas lets put it where are friends and family can see it. On The Wish Zone
If you want to try something really cool for Christmas, try out the Levitron - a levitating magnetic top. Once you get the hang of how using it, it's absolutely the coolest thing. It's very non-obvious from a physics perspective, in fact there have been several papers written on how it works (here's one).
I enjoy Lego and have lots of sets, including Mindstorms, however there is no better geek building toy than FischerTechnik. They have many levels of sets and their robotic line puts Mindstorms to shame with respect to build quality. The only problem is finding them in stores, effectively, they are only available online and they are not cheap.
http://www.fischertechnik.com/
I don't understand why everyone's so annoyed with star wars lego. Is it because star wars is no longer cool on slashdot? I agree that some of the smaller sets have more unique pieces that are less versatile. But has anyone tried looking at the Ultimate Collectors Series sets? Those more expensive sets with LOTS of little parts. No unique parts in that darth maul model or the star destroyer.
I don't have space in my apartment for real scale model building, so this is as close as I get and I don't mind it at all. Of course, those new designer sets look pretty cool too...
Yep, but that book is too technical. ;)
Nah, it is art - just think of (look at) pp. 83 ff. .
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Oh, sorry, my bad. I stopped buying them when my wife got pregnant. I only intended to put them away until their choking risk lowered significantly, but that hasn't happened yet. So far the kid is cheaper than the Lego habit though.
Lego, no question. I've played with it for as long as I can remember. I liked it all, city, space, mideaval and of course technic.
Jeez, not a *single* mention on the first page of replies about the Classic Holiday toy: trains. Not too expensive to start, not to expensive to continue (unless you're one of those who think that a "hobby" is a way to dispose of excess money....)
Under $100 for a basic set, $4-$40 for more cars, or scenery, etc.
And if that's too much, the Wham-O wheel, makes noise, drives viewers nuts....
mark
Get them Legos or Erector (laugh at the name) sets.
:-)
I spent years as a kid building all kinds of stuff with Legos, and it was a blast. Great for improving one's spatial thinking, and they can do it while building Lego cities or Lego cars to crash into each other (and then the pieces go flying everywhere!).
Fun stuff.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
go to samsclub.com type in 'bouncy ball' and search...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
#define try(x) ( do(x) ? do_not(x) : -1 ) /* do(), or do_not(), there is no try() */
If your child has any interest in electronics, get them this book - I assume it's still in print - it is the best introduction to electronics and electricity I have ever seen. I got it when I was 12 or so, and it's probably why I have an EE degree now.
;)
It is a perfect match to one of those 200-in-one kits, or better yet, a $200 gift certificate to digikey and a prototype board.
..don't panic
I recently collected up all the old Lego and Mechano from my parents house when they moved. I'm keeping them for when/if we decide to have kids.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
in the usa more people die or get hurt by guns pointed at them than other 'evolved' country...
i keep this on my desk - much easier to solve just the one face for today's date than solving the whole thing - but co-workers are still amazed that it can be done. too bad you can't find it anywhere anymore.
Great topic. I'm replying based on others' suggestions as well. Lincoln logs were always fun. Even better when smashing houses down with tonka trucks. Still available, but probably not wooden like they used to be. Erector set is the best toy I think. I had several made by Gilbert when I was a kid. I also had the 3 speed motor which provided great power for cranes and such. I prefer the mid70s stuff since the earlier type is probably not size compatible and I had a late model smaller set, and the plastic panels and thin beams just didn't inspire me at all. I like the stamped metal beams that would rust and the tiny wrench you got the tightening bolts. Tinkertoys were fun too. Remember making crude gears with the wooden hub and the short (yellow?) sticks? I always wanted one of those glass bulbs with a vane inside that would spin if you put it near heat or was it light? I also say a gyroscope was fun. Put it on a string, or try to twist it around whilst spinning. The hardest part was just trying to wind the string good so it would not pull out while getting it up to speed. Tonka trucks were the best. As a kid, we had over 10 vehicles and 3 tons of sand to play in. I made my brother play demo derby with his dump truck against others, and never really damaged the front of it. I even had a little backhoe that worked. The new trucks are nowhere near as good. They need to be all metal so they can stay outside for years to get a nice worn finish. Isnt it amazing that none of these toys are electronic? Kids need to get back to toys that run on creativity and imagination.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
... seen a bunch of kids in a front yark playing kill the man with the ball
Is it just me, or did most of us call this "Smear the Queer"? Admittedly, back then, I thought "queer" just meant "odd or unusual", but I thought I'd just comment based upon your complaint on how PC the world was getting.
That reminds me of this conversation on home schooling
My neighbor was picking my brain about getting the public school to challenge her first grader. She was concerned because my first grader was already reading while her son of the same age was just learning the sounds of letters. Nonetheless she challenged my home schooling saying my son would still miss out. "It's important for him socially too. He needs to be offered drugs so he can turn them down."
Who can argue with that logic?
I have a couple of 12" fresnel lenses-- they were all of $10 each from edmund scientific when I was in college. Looks like they have 11" square fresnels for $5 now.
Their industrial optics catalog can probably get you larger ones.
The 11" square is enough to melt pennies, and you don't have to be nearly as patient as you would have to with a piddly 4" round glass lens. I recommend adding a pair of welding goggles to the box when you give it to your kids as a present, though-- the "bright spot" it makes is more than a little bit dangerous to look at, even indirectly.
You sir, just made my friends list! I haven't laughed so hard and long in quite a while!
It did always seem that we had to always figure out a way to ADD MORE POWER! If it used 4 batteries, see what happens when you put 6 MORE in series! Plug it in the wall!
One year in MY youth the hot toy was the Marx Mystery Spaceship Gyro. It has considerable mass in the spinning metal disk inside, although like most things from my youth I probably wouldn't think it was so heavy today. It would twist your arm if you put in motion or changed the orientation while it was screaming away. Had we had today's high speed cordless drills we could have REALLY gotten that sucker spinning and might have done some damage!
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Haha! I had friend too! I played toy game outside! One time I had hit and got me inside one. Daddy kam to help. Daddy save me from bad things.
Daddy sometimes angry have to tak care uf me. Cant work all the time. But Jowoll like it ha! Jowoll don't mind. Jowoll like friends at home. Its fun! I get seatbelt for my arms.
Jowoll need TV now, the lady is on, the friend lady.
Daddy put TV on for Jowoll! Please!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.