Design a Child's toy!

[Whirligig Girl]

If intelligent spacemen built children's toys instead of corporate eggheads, the world would be a better place for kids. How would you design a toy, what would it be used with, what is the target player of the toy? I'm in the process of creating the concept for a toy train product that would be in between the overly simplified and unrealistic Tomy Playrail/Thomas Trackmaster style trains, and the realism and detail of model train layouts/sets.

If you're a non-minor, feel free to leave your age just so we can get a good idea of how the ideas of a 30 year old differs from that of a 20 year old. If you are a minor, simply state Teenager or Child. (Specific age is not allowed on these forums if you're a minor.)

[Nuke]

one year fairly recently i got an n scale train set for xmas. which is weird because im in my 30s and dont like trains much. i was rather disappointed with how 1950s the technology was. i guess model train people tend to be rather conservative (and real train people if you live in 'murica). i think im going to mod it with lithium cells and brushless motors. and see how fast i can make it. or i can just sell it on ebay and buy moar dev boards.

you want to get gets into stem. get them technic legos, a computer, and an arduino. i use all 3 to do awesome things.

Edited September 24, 2014 by Nuke

[ZedNova]

I would design a toy that's about the size of an iPad, but i would make it of solid plastic, and it would have a white knob on the left and right sides.

The knobs would control a needle and some magic dust on the inside of the toy, turning the knobs in the right way will allow you to draw pictures.

[Kane Hart]

I think a big part of toys now besides the 3+ year old toys is that there designed to stimulate the mind. Help growth and education in the child.

[Whirligig Girl]

Due to my decidedly childish nature, I still understand toys. Model trains are not good toys, but toy trains are. Model trains are slow, flat, and boring. The fun in model trains is the putting the model railway together (or if you like a challenge, shunting trucks). The fun in toy trains is the crashes, thrills, and spills. You can have plots of elevations, high speed chases, and your trains can be characters.

Kids don't care about lights and sounds and automation. They want to play with their hands and their imagination. They don't want aquarium cars instead of boxcars. Boxcars/Goods Vans can have anything in them, an Aquarium Car can only hold one thing for one destination.

The idea of a simple toy being the most fun was brought up in an Episode of Phineas and Ferb. It was called Toy to The World. A company makes a "toy" that's just a monkey moving up and down a tree by itself. Phineas and Ferb realize that that's not fun enough, and pitch their idea of a toy to the CEO of the toy manufacturer. It's a green wooden block painted like their platypus. It was so simple it could be anything! A bucking bronco, an airplane, a dancer, or a platypus. This is akin to a child finding a stick and using it a a sword, or a fishing rod, or a lightsaber, or a gun, or a Sonic Screwdriver.

[Moss]

Fisher-Price Arduino. It must happen.

[Whirligig Girl]

Fisher-Price Arduino. It must happen.

Yes. That's a great idea!

[Canopus]

Hot wheels but instead of "boring" cars they are Fighterjets and other cool airplanes. I don't get why that doesn't exist yet.

[KOCOUR]

Kids don't care about lights and sounds and automation.

Wrong!! the more noise it does and more lights it has, the more kids like it. I see it on my friends kids, and i remember myself as a kid, i loved everything what made lot of noise and light. Provided that i was able to set light and noise pattern.

Only thing that i loved more than noizy blinky toys was brick builders like legos or similar. But i never had Any Legos, only cheap copys of legos as Lego was, too expensive then. But those cheap copys was good enough, i lowed them anyway, and i had tons of them. Once me and my younger brother, we build a cyty with those legocopys in our room. It has ropeways working elevators all manuall, Railway, and foot bridges between buildings, and it took entire floorspace of the room. we composed even furniture into it. it was Friggin awesome, untill my grandmother ordered us to destroy it because it prevented the room from being cleaned. :-)

Edited September 25, 2014 by KOCOUR

[Sky_walker]

Wrong!! the more noise it does and more lights it has, the more kids like it

That's.... some sort of galaxy-wide rule?

[GreeningGalaxy]

My grandpa built and sold what he called "lightboxes" when I was little. They were just your normal Radioshack project box, with the lid packed full of switches, LEDs (and, if you were lucky, a few potentiometers) all hooked up to each other in different configurations. He originally made them for toddlers who liked to mess with radio equipment (which apparently included myself) but as I grew up and started to have more involved pretend games with my sister, the lightboxes became control panels for spaceships and remote controls for drones and fancy science devices for labs.

I always wished they had buzzers and motors and things on them, but my parents (who were sadly listened to more by my grandpa) balked at the idea of me being allowed to control loud noises.

I wonder if I still have any of those...

[Skyler4856]

Imagine an expanded erector set with more circuit pieces, combined with scratch

[GreeningGalaxy]

Raspberry Pi (with a simple method of controlling I/O pins from a Scratch-like programming environment) combined with Snap Circuits combined with Lego Mindstorms robotics parts. Would approach the versatility of VEX kits, but would be easier to put together and program.

[KOCOUR]

That's.... some sort of galaxy-wide rule?

Universe-wide my friend, Universe-Wide.

[Tommygun]

one year fairly recently i got an n scale train set for xmas. which is weird because im in my 30s and dont like trains much. i was rather disappointed with how 1950s the technology was. i guess model train people tend to be rather conservative (and real train people if you live in 'murica). i think im going to mod it with lithium cells and brushless motors. and see how fast i can make it. or i can just sell it on ebay and buy moar dev boards.

you want to get gets into stem. get them technic legos, a computer, and an arduino. i use all 3 to do awesome things.

Look up digital model trains and then have your wife hide your credit card and 401K password from you.

Digital model railway control systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_model_railway_control_systems

http://www.zimo.at/web2010/newsletters/ZIMO%20Newsletter%202011%20Januar_EN.pdf

Personally I would like to see small working metal jet engine kits. Just something that works on a test stand.

I have seen people make them from old soup cans and run them on propane, so a kit should be doable.

Yes they would need supervision, but I had a gas powered propeller driven flying saucer like toy as a kid that could chop fingers off.

You threw it into the air and it went where ever it wanted to. The 70's where a fun time for kids.

[FrostFyre]

I'm not going to state my age, but I believe I can contribute. Once, when I was small, I used wooden blocks along with toy train tracks to make a bridge. But it wasn't just any old bridge. It was about 2-3 feet tall and could support a full sized train (3-6 sections, not counting the engine). I would also estimate about that it was about 2-3 feet long. It took me a long time to build, but it was awesome for the maybe 40 minutes it lasted. The bridge building parts in normal toy train tracks are absolutely infuriating to use (especially if you want to build something taller than a few inches), so why not create a modular bridge-building system? Also, if you're wondering, it was Thomas the train engine toys that I used. The wooden ones, not the (in my opinion) horrible plastic ones.

Edited October 4, 2014 by FrostFyre

[megatiger78]

how about a official model hypetrain?

[Whirligig Girl]

If I ever get my hands on a Black Five model, I'll definitely modify it to be a HypeTrain.

[EdFred]

Hot wheels but instead of "boring" cars they are Fighterjets and other cool airplanes. I don't get why that doesn't exist yet.

They do, or did. I had a few when I in the single digit age group. Of course that was (mumbles) years ago.

[megatiger78]

some toy rocket modules. like psyical ksp.

[Skyler4856]

I remember when I was little, I had a toy motorcycle which ran off of chemical reactions.