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

Dad, is that you!?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Dad, is that you!?

[techsoldaten]

My Dad forced me to do it the hard way. He bought one of those Rubik's Cubes where the colors were built into heavy, glossy panels and surrounded with a white border - there would be no sticker swapping in my household. The cube itself was heavy, weighing at least 1.5 pounds (which was a lot of ask a 10 year old child to have to hold for 30 minutes at a time). The axes resisted attempts at rotation and it took great effort to make one actually turn. Any movement would audibly click into place, giving each action a sense of dreadful finality.

My attempts to solve the cube would always end in failure and exhaustion, and I was very jealous of those who could take the Gordian approach and just move the stickers. Given a lighter, move wieldy cube I could have easily solved it using a traditional method, but that was not to be. It was like Rubik himself was laughing at me, giving me a problem so interesting yet so impossible to solve. When I was 14, I finally gave up on the cube and smashed it using a large rock. Pieces of it were still there years later when I went off to college.

M

Legos

[genkael]

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.

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...

Lawn Darts

[hAkron]

Not the plastic tipped ones either...

Buy Yourself an Projection HDTV

[ralf1]

Give the kid the box. He'll make a fort and have hours of fun, and you get yours too.

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.

Obligatory Monty Python Joke

[Eviljay]

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

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.

You really want to know?

[Swamii]

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.

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.

Simon rules!

[static0verdrive]

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...)

Re:Rubik's Cube

[stratjakt]

The facts are, DHS is made up of what once was INS and Customs.

It's in fact their job to prevent bootlegged products from hitting American markets, so quit trying to spin this story as some kind of ridiculous "war on terror gone crazy" horseshit.

Magnifying glass

[drdanny_orig]

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!

200-in-1 Electronics Lab

[nautical9]

I toy I absolutely loved as a kid was the 200-in-1 Electronics Lab. It's basically just a bunch of raw electronics bits (diodes, transistors, resistors, a small numerical display, etc) all hookup up to little springs, a whole bunch of wires to connect pieces together, and a huge book with simple projects and diagrams on how to create little "apps".

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.

Re:Legos

[ArsonSmith]

The plural of sheep is lego in Europe? You guys are wierd.

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

Re:Classic toy

[TheGavster]

There's no reason that you shouldn't teach your children about those things. If alcohol isn't a rebellious thing, but simply a beverage, then they are less likely to abuse it. Simply ignoring the existance of something dangerous will not protect your children from it; either you can educate them, or society can educate them, and society doesn't have a great track record in that respect.

Ummm ....

[gstoddart]

the odds that you'll create a valid cube combination by moving stickers is slim. Even if you make all faces solid color the chances that the internals of the cube correctly representing the face colors is slim.

Maybe I'm missing your point ... but have you seen the inside of a rubiks cube? The individual pieces don't "know" they correspond to the blue face.

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

Re:Gyroscopes are GREAT!!!!!

[Torontoman]

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?"