With my niece and nephews now old enough to have their own children and with various friends having successfully reproduced, I’m buying lots of children’s gifts for the holidays. The ones that get good reviews from both parents and children include the Leapfrog learning toys. They’re well designed and take kids from infancy to the early teens. The latest hit is the Leapster Multimedia Learning System, which my eldest great niece has been enjoying since her birthday. (I got my niece and nephews the Apple GS — “GS” for “Graphics and Sound” — with such games as “Reader Rabbit” and “Math Blaster” years ago and this is just the next step for the next generation.)
Of course, none of the above is likely to be handed down from generation to generation, so I’m still a big fan of the old fashioned information storage and retrieval devices known as “books.”
I often wonder as to my mental health when I see all these new toys and want nothing else but to sit down and play with them. I had a plastic thing that would speak letters, but there wasn’t even a toy available that can do what those things can do now.
The new teaching toys are so sophisticated that they’re fascinating. The problem is that they won’t have the lasting value that some of the older toys (educational or not) had. They break more easily and are quickly made obsolete….much like the toys of adults (laptops, PDAs, etc., etc.).