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Tech Toys Dominate Toy Fair 2007
Edis Krad writes "An CNN Money article previews the Hot Toys for 2007 from this past week's Toy Fair. The article is a great place to start looking through the hundreds of new products that were on display at the annual industry event. Among those featured in the article, I was particularly impressed with the Video Journal (blogging for kids?), the virtual bicycle (apparently, riding a real bicycle isn't cool enough anymore), and last but not least, the robotic parrot, that oddly reminds me of the replicant owl in Blade Runner. For more details on tech toys at the event, IEEE Spectrum has a rundown on the nerdier toys available. Artificial snow and a pre-assembled Mentos/Coke kit were two of that journalist's favorites. For different perspectives Forbes has a look at the toy business as it stands since last week, and Wired's Luddite column crabs that kids have too many techie toys nowadays. Dagnabit."
BoardGameNews has some nice coverage. Day One, Day Two and Day Three. Note the Khet (previously Deflexion) tower expansion. I'm definately getting the base set, beam splitters and tower when the tower comes out.
An endless stream of toys just encourages unbounded consumerism and listlessness while stifling creativity.
Kids learn and creat more by playing with the box than they do from playing with most toys.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I concur with this posting. Not only do I have a four year old and a two year old in the same situation, I also happen to own a toy business - http://www.rlt.com/
My observation of not only my own kids, but also of my customers, is that kids really prefer to use toys they can learn something from, without feeling like they're being taught. In other words, they want to explore and discover things on their own.
Give them a toy that only seems exciting, and they'll play with it for five minutes and put it away forever. Give them something where they can learn a skill, and they'll keep playing with it. Case in point - The Hula Hoop, legos or a frisbee vs. 99% of the colorful cheap crap on toy shelves today.
Same with Tech toys. Tech toys that amuse adults are designed to capture your attention within a few seconds, and get you to buy it. Just like a Roger Corman film. Once you've bought the ticket, what's in the box doesn't really matter. Colors, shapes and cool noises won't make a toy a good one.
Here's another example- recently, I took my kids to Utah. The skiing wasn't so hot, so we went to a place called "The Treehouse." It's a playroom for kids, crammed with all sorts of toys and adventures. We spent the whole day there, and to my surprise the most popular thing was a block toy called Kapla.
Kapla is just wooden sticks, all the same. 1/4" x 1" x 4". There were about 4000 of them in a big wheelbarrow, and a few pictures of some amazing things that people have built with them. Kids loved to try and duplicate what they saw in the pictures with the blocks. Meanwhile, in another part of the exhibit, a very friendly looking robotic grandma waited to read stories to anyone who would sit in her lap. No one did. They were all playing with the Kapla blocks. I watched a three year old girl build a tower over several attempts, until she finally made it taller than she was.
The lesson I learned was that hi-tech or not, the best toys offer kids the opportunity for discovery and achievement. Any hi-tech toy that's just tech for tech's sake gets boring pretty quickly. Old tech can be pretty cool too. One of my most popular products is a catapult - http://www.catapultkits.com/ - high tech from 800 years ago! The feedback I get from parents is that nothing has gotten their kids more excited about learning math than the catapult, and the equations for calculalting range and efficiency that come with it. "That egg only went 100 feet. How can we get it to clear the fence?!" Longer sling? More counterweight? Different release angle? -- opportunities to explore...