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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?"
LightBright Pwns.
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This doesn't beg the question, it raises the question. See here.
What a fantastic game. Blended the best between mindless destruction and strategic annihilation. You can still get copies off eBay.
Nothing like trying to draw a circle on that sucker.
"That's not ironic, it's just mean!" - Bender
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.
"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
Treat yourself to a brand new one straight from http://www.rubikshop.com/!
Seven Towns still makes Rubik's toys, though the current color scheme for the Magic puzzle isn't the same as the cooler original that Matchbox made. However, they now sell do-it-yourself kits that allow you to make your own Magic puzzles.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
'nuff said.
t orset.htm
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/erec
In Europe, of course, the plural of Lego is Lego. Like sheep.
:-)
But they are, I agree, an absolute must for kids of all ages, in order to instil a properly reductionist mindset
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
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?
And not just for kids either... this has been seen on slashdot before, but the things people can do with Lego Mindstorms is simply amazing. An expensive set to be sure, but it's a toy that will scale up as the child grows older, and it's probably the most user friendly robotics set ever created. Of course, for $179.99 US (MSRP) you might want to just get one for yourself and ignore the kids altogether.
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.
Legos are a must-have for every Christmas tree. My offspring are now old enough, so this year they are getting the Lego Mindstorms robotics stuff. Very cool toys for nerds and their kids.
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...)
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77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
Along that line of the "Technics" legos -- how about the old Erector sets (or the equivelant Meccano sets)?
I used to play with those a lot -- mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, gear/pulley ratios, etc. Although Techics Legos are cool, I think that Erector sets are much more time tested.
It's capsela, and I loved em' too:
www.discoverthis.com/capsela.html
www.yoyoguy.com
They also have Unicycles.
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
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!
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!
Kids these days would probably just visit a cube solver webpage like http://www.wrongway.org/cube/solve.html instead of peeling stickers.
Speaking of stickers - anyone remember sticker collecting. Do kids today even know about stickers?
no... theres a big difference. I remember as a cub scout learning how to shoot a bb gun. it was a fun and rewarding experience. Comparing a gun with cigarettes, booze, hookers and illegal drugs is just not valid. The above do not have many legitimate uses. Guns however can be a hobby.
It teaches kids hand eye coordination as well, and the practice of aiming, being careful, thinking about what your doing, taking your time, and being responsible. All things a kid should learn.
When used responsibly with supervision there's nothing wrong with them. Is shooting a coke can with bb's really such a horrible thing?
phil
Luxury.
You were lucky.
I used to have to get up half and hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, head off to work at the coal mine and pay for the luxury of working there, come home 2 hours after I went to sleep, and THEN father would cut us in two with a breadknife and dance on our graves singing Hallelujah.
And you tell kids these days about how they have it so easy, and they don't believe you...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
No, you're not mapping out the area when you geocache. Geocaching is a lot like searching for buried treasure. Generally, people hide boxes filled with random goodies in somewhat remote locations and post the GPS coordinates (the 'treasure map', basically) to websites like the one above. Then people go find the caches, record that they've been there on a log, and exchange an item in the cache for one they've brought.
... make it truly a quest for some buried treasure. Just make sure you don't go overboard ... not like the characters in the Knights of the Dinner Table when one of them set up a cache and then decided to defend it (issue 64).
If you had permission from the owner of the land on which the cave was built, you could combine geocaching with spelunking
Y|
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.
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.
I don't think (most) people are just randomly moving stickers usually they are putting the stickers to solve the cube. However if you do just move stickers yes it very easily could be unsolvable.
The internals are identical peices each corner looks the same and each edge looks the same and each center looks the same. You could make two colors from opposite ends of the cube to be edge "buddies" (whole cube face same color--a solution) and the solvers will fail (if they depend on color positions)---yet the cube still can be solved.
Can you ping me now?... Good!
You can definitely trademark the "look" of something. That's what Coca Cola's red-and-white cans and Nike's swooshes are all about.
The actual standard is whether there is potential for "confusion in the marketplace" as to whether your product is the original or not. It doesn't require outright fraud claiming that it is, just enough similarity that your hypothetical Typical Consumer might mistake it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
Helmets are great; I'm a convert (especially since I like my helmet-mount mirror). But proper riding techniques are better. The helmet's the last line of defense in safety and sadly over-emphasized. With kids, who are more likely to fall and still developing both motor skills and interaction with other traffic, they're most important.
To get back on topic, depending on temperment of the kid and financial situation, a bike can be a great gift.
Available at Amazon
A little more "Lego-like" but still all the fun (and a little bit of the danger) of playing with electricity.
Wow, Capsella. First of all, it's still on the market, even though I haven't owned any in years. It's the most amazing toy I ever had, loved the thing and definitely is better than Lego, Erector, etc. at making an engineer out of someone - what I wouldn't give to have one right now, because I'd still love it - and I never really did like Erector.
As for a chess set, I've been without one for a while, and just got one for my 17th birthday. My brothers and I have been playing several games a day for the past... 9 days. Still fun.
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.