OK, I am into Legos (actually Lego® bricks) just as much as the next guy, and I am into Star Wars just as much as the next guy, but this new offering from Lego is just nuts.
We celebrated my son's 6th birthday on Saturday - a big milestone now that he is finishing up Kindergarten, reading voraciously and working out multplication tables as we drive to breakfast (you laugh, but my three old plays with an abacus).
More legos, which are always a big hit (Dangerous Creatures!), although this year he also received two boxes of Pixelblocks. Whoa! These are like high-definition legos. They rate a second picture in the posting!
I bought a Leapster for my son's fifth birthday almost a year ago, but he recently "re-discovered" it and it has become a prime toy.
It's a neat unit - four AAs and it seems to have many days worth of play time. It runs Macromedia FLASH, which isn't really apparent, except that you get some decent animations with I suspect very little processor power (which means longer battery life and lower cost). I paid about $80 for it at Costco which included a couple of cartridges.
The catridges, about the size of a thick matchbook, cost around $25, although you can get them for $15 or so on eBay. In order to keep from losing them I bought a Leapster case which includes a pocket to hold the cartridges. As expected, my son lost the case a few weeks later, including all of his cartridges that were in the pocket. Nice. Now we keep them in a sandwich baggie.
The games are educational and entertaining - numbers, letters, shapes, - the levels and complexity increase into early elementary school levels. My 3 year old daughter has also enjoyed it very much and I recently picked up a Disney Princess pre-K catridge for her (for both, actually, there is a mandatory sharing policy in our house).
Leapfrog seems to have a done a decent job on content with a decent supply of homegrown stuff plus the requisite Disney, Dora the Explorer, Incredibles, Pixar, and on and on.
The unit is easy to grip and has so far withstood a few drops on our slate floor (cringe). Of course there is a headphone jack and the kids seem to have picked up on its operation quickly.
Someday soon they will get older and get bored of it, moving to X-Box, PSP, etc. but until then I hope they keep up this positive and educational aspect of console gaming.
This is no authoritative or comprehensive list, just a take on what seems to be working this holiday season in the Digital Dad realm for Dads and kids:
Any other suggestions?
We celebated our 3 year old's birthday last weekend - plenty of Hello Kitty, pink cotton candy, and strawberry milk.
And plenty of batteries. Is there any more viable form of currency for the Digital Dad?
I take two tactics when it comes to batteries. I buy a big block of "Kirkland" AAs at Costco as a backup. But my primarty stock is rechargeables.
Rechargeables are pretty varied. The older type are NiCad. These batteries have a "memory effect" where they remember where they discharged to previously and tend to run dry at that point forever. With NiCads you want to discharge them all the way down before you re-charge. Hassle.
Li-Ion are used in notebooks and other electronic portables but I have not seen them in AA or other standard formats yet.
NiMH are the recharge technology of choice. Virtually every major brand has rechargeables that use this technology. All of the re-chargers have been interopeable in my experience.
The main thing i look for is the mAH rating - that is, how many milliamps can be squeezed into the battery? Turns out there is a wide range. i have seen 1000 mAH all the way up to the Duracells i just bought that run 2050 mAH - that's effectively double the capacity.
Given you can re-charege them 1000 times it's hard to reason why you'd buy an Akaline again.
Here is an interesting article on personal robots from Business Week sent in by a reader. I understand the Roomba is pretty cool, but what about the Robomower?
Ready To Buy A Home Robot? C-3PO they're not -- yet -- but more smart devices are available than you might think.
For a one-month-old, the latest addition to the Lee family runs circles around the word precocious. She sings, dances, and even teaches English to 4-year-old Lee Da-bin and 7-year-old Da-yea. Those feats and other special talents are something only a robot like herself can claim. When Mom, Choi Ji-Hoon, is out, she can use a wireless link to peek in on things through the robot's video camera eyes and send video messages to the kids through an embedded monitor.
Can you run to the store and buy a robot? Chances are, you already have. By the definitions of many engineers, your TiVo (TIVO ) digital video recorder and microwave oven are robotic simply because they contain sensors, microprocessors, and rudimentary artificial intelligence that allow them to do repeated tasks without human intervention. Toys are also a hotbed of robotics: For $200, you can buy a robot-invention kit called LEGO Mindstorms. Your trusty BlackBerry e-mail console fetches messages with the help of semi-autonomous robot software programs, known as bots.
More at BusinessWeek online.
One of the fun things about being a Dad is playing with your kids' toys.
When I was a kid I played with LEGOS quite a bit. There were a few different kits you could get - a small tub, a medium tub or a large tub!
Now that my son is five he has become a real LEGO fan himself, and they certainly have come a long way.. Two "sets" that have caught his attention are Bionicles and LEGO Inventor sets.
Bionicles are robot kits that come in a tube or sometimes a box. There's some complex story about each one and their Bionicle universe (and an associated DVD of course). There are some simple gears in there so they can swing their arms, etc. and generally are just cool looking.
The Inventor sets are fantastic. He is into the Record and Play one, which has a base motor which can remember and play back specific movemnents. You build some very complex robots and then program the base motor to follow certain movements. The instructions go page by page, block by block, so he can follow along and put these things together.
For older kids there are Mindstorms which provide a far more complex programming system.
A far cry from the 4x2 blocks of my youth.
