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?"

Comments

I hate the cube

[thered]

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.

My 2 1/2 year old...

[asdfasdfasdfasdf]

...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...

Playmobile

[Phixxr]

I'm going to have to say Playmobil. Just simply action figures and such, but so very very detailed. Expensive, as those european toys always are, but well worth it in my opinion. http://www.playmobil.com/

-Phixxr

My favorites

[acvh]

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.

And what about Stratego?

[VE3ECM]

Stratego was (and still is) a fun game to play that doesn't require the sometimes hours and hours it takes to play Risk.

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.

How about...

[LWATCDR]

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.

toys are evil

[theMerovingian]

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.

ahh the memories... Lego car-crash contests!

[Black Perl]

Lego, ahh the memories, we used to build ever more fancy cars and race them into each other and see which one would survive.

My brother and I would do the same thing!

Rules:

1. Build a car--it had to roll freely and have four wheels. Sometimes we used a rule variant that it had to contain a lego man.
   
2. On the count of 1,2,3, roll 'em toward each other and wait for the crash.
   
3. If a piece breaks off, you lose. Otherwise if your car flips off its wheels, it's a loss. In the lego man variation, if your man is shaken loose, it's a loss.
   
4. Repeat Steps 2 & 3 until you have a winner.
   
5. Winner keeps his car, loser gets to rebuild in order to try to beat it.
   

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

Erector Sets

[SeanDuggan]

They're plastic these days. :( We still have one of the old metal sets at home, compete with electric motor with two gear ratios. There was just something inherently solid about creating your mechanisms with metal beams and bolts. Heck, after we accidentally broke a bed by jumping on it, my oldest brother Michael fixed it with one of those corner pieces from the Erector Set and it took months for my parents to realize the bed had ever been broken.

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...)

Re:Ummm ....

[isepic]

if you move the stickers, you'll have to learn a new way to solve it. ALL the published techniques (and java engines, etc.) to solve it are based on the original placement of the stickers. Most of the automated solutions I've seen even state, it will not work if the stickers have been rearranged, or if the cube was apart and put back together differently.

Nuff said.

Re:Ummm ....

[gstoddart]

if you move the stickers, you'll have to learn a new way to solve it. ALL the published techniques (and java engines, etc.) to solve it are based on the original placement of the stickers. Most of the automated solutions I've seen even state, it will not work if the stickers have been rearranged, or if the cube was apart and put back together differently.

Well, since I can solve the cube, and I have disassembled and re-stickered literally dozens of cubes, I must again say NO.

Assume for the moment that each face has been correctly re-assembled with one colour/face -- the nominal position. Most of the solving techniques involve identifying the opposite and adjacent faces, and the patterns of moving pieces are to make them line up. From there it's not all that complicated.

I concur that if you take apart the cube and re-assemble it in a randomized pattern, you won't solve it. Same goes for randomly moving the stickers. But I'm specifically saying that once you have each cube face as being exactly one colour, it's all the same, and just variations on the same theme.

Solve the cube, re-sticker it. If Blue and green used to be adjacent, make the opposite. Solve the cube again. The moves are all relative to the known configuration (each face is one colour), not which colour is on which face.

Again, taking it apart and re-assembling it randomly is not what I am saying works. If you start with a cube in a known-good state (all faces have one colour), you will always have a cube that behaves self-consistently.

But I can gurantee you that if you take a cube to someone who can manually solve it, have them solve it, then switch the colours of two faces, that person will still be able to solve that exact cube.

You can take this all the way to moving all six faces, because the pattern is based on an association between the elements, and the assumption you don't have a truly randomized cube. In that case, the colours of a corner piece would not match up to the relative orientation of the center faces (the only pieces which never actually change their location).

I'm saying there are a bunch of valid "original placement of the stickers" which can be made to work. Wether the blue face is opposite to green, yellow, red, orange, or white, the mechanism for solving the cube does not change.

This doesn't mean I expect any reassembly of the cube to be solveable, but if you strip off the stickers and assemble it as a finished cube, that cube is solveable by the exact same techniques always used.