First, I grabbed a few spare parts that we had around the house … A matchbox car, a balloon, a couple of straws and three rubber bands. We had several types of straws and we ended up going with a bendy straw so we could angle the “motor” properly. The cool moment for me was when I put the items randomly on the floor and our seven year knew exactly what and how we were going to make it. He gave explicit instructions and then explained how air pressure moves from high to low areas in order to reach equilibrium and that the net result would be that the wind from the balloon would push the car across the floor.

The science isn’t difficult at all and neither is the construction. Here it is in action… Post a link to yours if you make one too!!

- Dana

Santa brought 4 total – two for our son and two for our daughter. Our daughter calls both of hers “mousy” even though their given names are Chunk (white) and Jilly (pink). Please note that Jilly is no relation to Jill. Our son is fine with respecting the manufacturer’s wishes and call his Num Nums (grey) and Mr. Squiggles (brown).

The toys don’t do too much but they do more than you would think. They have sounds indicating they are moving like roosters or boings. They zip forward, spin around, and shoot off in another direction.

The kids love them and treat them like they are their kids. In the picture shown, the Zhu Zhu pets are at the movies but tomorrow they have hamster school. Very fun.

- Dana

This year, the instant hit toy was Splatball. As usual, it is a super simple toy. It looks like a tomato and is a liquid filled thing. All you do is throw it and when it lands it looks like a tomato that splattered on the floor. After about 2-5 seconds, it reforms into a little tomato. It costs about $2.99 and the kids’ grandma bought it at Harris Teeter.

It was very cool. Be careful because if you use excessive force, it will indeed break.

- Dana

- Dana

The nice thing about the catapult (Falcon 4) is that we made it completely out of scraps and recycled material.  The bad thing is that only fired a gumball about 10-15 feet.  If you decide to build one, please make sure that you don’t leave your kids alone around them as they definitely have some snap-back. That said, we challenged ourselves to something bigger … and Falcon 5 was born.

We spent a few minutes on the Internet and found some substandard free plans for miniature seige weapons and were unsatisfied so we sat down and drew this one out.  Luckily, it worked only after about two or three modifications to the original design.

The first step was to build the frame – a 54″ by 27″ box made out of 2″x4″ lumber. As you can see, it is also the perfect size for Brennan to lay down in.

You can see in the picture that there is a cross lap joint which is about 3.5″ wide to fit and hold the uprights.  This was a pretty cool experience to see Brennan working with tools really for the first time mostly by himself. I was impressed to see him using a hammer that was about as big as he was.  And don’t worry he didn’t operate the chop saw in the photo.

After chiseling the joint and cutting a half lap in the uprights, we attached the 40 in uprights with drywall screws.  For a crossbar, we bought a steel rod from Home Depot and cut it to fit the width.  For the swing arm, we cut a 8 ft 2 by 2 down to 6ft.  The cross bar split the swing arm at about 41 inches.

Instead of creating a trough specific for the projectile to slide down, we just put a piece of plywood to the cover the entire surface of the frame.  For the counterweight, we used a 10lb diving belt weight and the pouch which was cut from a shop towel was attached to the swing arm with twine.  This was definitely a pretty simple trebuchet to build but then again, we did it with no plans and no help.  At the end of the day, we were able to consistently launch a 0.1 lb ball of kidney beans wrapped in aluminum foil about 35-40 ft.

Here it is all finished and being fired for the first time.  If you look to the left of the swing arm in the second picture, you’ll see the first gumball we launched and the first pouch which we made out of duct tape (it didn’t work well at all).

I’ll post a video now that I am back in Charlotte and have my video camera. I have to reassemble the trebuchet when Jill isn’t looking so wish me luck.

Dana

While the box says it is good for kids older than 8, Brennan (5) was very quick to figure out how the pieces go together.  They snap together like Legos so he was able to assemble, with the help of the pictures in the manual, just about every one of the configurations.  He hasnt stopped playing with the toy since Christmas which is more than we can say for just about everything else, including the horrible Magnext toy.  From a pure mechanics point of view, he loved building everything.

In addition to the fun of flat out building things, we were able to help Brennan learn about electricity through the toy too. The toy has a couple of different types of parts: an on/off switch, basic connectors, a space war siren, a light bulb, a motor, a fan (also called a UFO), and a couple of resistors.  In total there were about 100 different projects to start with and Bren figured out several others, which I subsequently had to explain how they worked which was fun too.  The projects teach basic circuitry and the projects are designed to get subsequently more intricate as your go through the booklet.  The projects took him about 5-15 minutes each to figure out and he played with each one for perhaps an hour or so. His favorite project, by far, was the flying UFO project.  Here is a picture of the instruction and his implementation of it:

As promised here is a quick video of it in action:

We paid around $27-30 at Radio Shack for this version and here are couple of Amazon affilitate links for some others that I am considering for gifts later in the year:

• Snap Circuits SC-300
• Snap Circuits Deluxe Snap Rover Kit
• Electronic Experiment Kit with Computer Inteface, Snap-Circuits

-Dana

Here were the issues:

• the gears didn’t snap easily onto the base
• when the gears would snap onto the base, they hardly ever turned without a push
• when they did turn, they were quite uninteresting unlike the photo on the box
• no instructions were included in the box to help figure out how to make the “20 interesting designs”
• my son quickly lost interest in it

I think the best way to describe this is a technical toy that a product designer probably worked very hard on building but it’s terrible.  The toy was so bad that if I were the company, I would let the designer go.

Dana