Every year, we buy our kids toys based on what they request, what the “hot” toys are, what looks educational, and what we think looks fun. In addition to those items, we’ll randomly pick up a couple of things. Regardless of how much thought we put into it, the toy that the kids like best is typically one of the random toys.
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.
Two weekends ago, my parents brought three large garbage bags of my old toys to me from their house. The bags are filled with all my old Star Wars figures, Lincoln Logs, Rubik’s Cubes (yes, I had more than one), Legos, and a mystery shirt from some toy. I need your help in identifying it, please! Shoot me an email, tweet (@danaedwards), or leave a comment here if you have any idea. Thanks!
If you’ve read any of the others posts here or seen the videos, you know that my son is into projects especially those related to science. My son loved the Snap Circuits toy because of the cool things he could build. My wife and I recommend it because he jumped right into, can play with it by himself or with us, and he is learning about one of his favorite things – electricity.
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:
Wow! I never thought a toy that looked as cool as this would be this bad. The Magnext Dynamix Gears and Elektronix is clearly the worst toy I have seen this year. The toy was billed as “helps understand the basics of physics in an innovative, fun and cool way” so I was drawn in fast. My son loves gears, rockets (see Falcon 1 post), electricity, magnets and pretty much anything that moves if you press a button. This was going to be the toy for him. I would find out after about 15 minutes that the other marketing line was slightly more accurate “Encourages patience, observation and a great sense of accomplishment”. It definitely encouraged patience but I had none for this toy.
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.
toy because of the cool things he could build. My wife and I recommend it because he jumped right into, can play with it by himself or with us, and he is learning about one of his favorite things – 
is clearly the worst toy I have seen this year. The toy was billed as “helps understand the basics of physics in an innovative, fun and cool way” so I was drawn in fast. My son loves gears, rockets (see 
