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Classic Toys For Christmas?

Posted by Cliff on from the fourty-two-shopping-days-left dept.

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?"

6 of 1,085 comments (clear)

  1. My 2 1/2 year old... by asdfasdfasdfasdf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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...

  2. My favorites by acvh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. And what about Stratego? by VE3ECM · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  4. How about... by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. toys are evil by theMerovingian · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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
  6. ahh the memories... Lego car-crash contests! by Black+Perl · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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
    --
    bp