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Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

Teddy Ruxpin. That was mine.

My parents got it for me (an expensive gift!) When I found out it didn't actually talk, but instead had a cassette tape with "conversations" pre-loaded onto its back, I never picked it up again.

Though I was really young, I still remember the disappointment and anger it caused me. "But the commercials...they said it talked!"

I do think we could use some of our tech genius to make better toys that delight and transform kids. What sort of programming would a real sorting hat require? And wouldn't that be way more fun than Yet Another Social Network? Food for thought.

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Toys associated with the super-stimulant fantasies depicted on TV are always going to fall short. You won’t be able to make toys good enough. Instead the answer is to address the deception that these fantasies can ever truly be realized.

If that sounds depressing don’t forget that life is full of fantastic amazing things that do really exist and can really be experienced. As such, some of the best toys are not toys at all, they are the means of expressing our own imaginations. Why not get your children to grow a garden, find and classify animals and observe their behavior, paint, compose music, build robots, cook, write, program, etc.

For me intelligence is very much a function of the amount of time spent mentally incubating on an issue with the ability to frequently test your ideas against reality. Think of the hours of mental incubation (spanning over years) that a child loses to dead-end make-believe. This exposure must serve to keep the child in a state of confusion about how the world actually works.

Now hold on there. Make-believe is an important component! While you certainly don't want the kid to spend their entire life in a fantasy world, it's been demonstrated that make-believe basically improves your creative abilities later in life.

Hm. Maybe YC should fund someone to do this? ;)

No need to wait for YC, there are many, many entities operating in the "tech toy" scene. To name a few...

LaunchPad toys (http://launchpadtoys.com/) are doing some amazing things with the iPad.

Chris O'Shea (http://www.chrisoshea.org/) is a British designer in that space who did a fun little app recently called MakeGo which got great reception.

Cynthia Breazal's group at the MIT Media Lab did some mind blowing things with Tofulandia (http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/tofulandia/tofu...).

Keita Takahashi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keita_Takahashi), who comes from a video game background, did some interesting work on playgrounds (how to make a 21st century playground?)

Yes, this is something I'm quite passionate about :)

We funded Launchpad Toys.

Oh I was kidding - kinda. We applied to do exactly this for YC W12 and we got an interview, but didn't get selected for funding. We've got decent traction and are continuing regardless. Focused on iOS for now, but with plans to extend to physical toys as we grow our user base. So far, so good.

I had this Toontastic App idea. It is platform which lets kids to become more imaginative and unleashes creativity. Many more apps should come like this for kids.

Given the way mobile computing hardware has been going, plus stuff like Siri, it seems like the time is ripe for "Furby Done Right." shudder

Have you seen Ubooly? Uses iPhone + voice recognition.

I can't speak for you, but when I was a child the toys with staying power for my brothers and I were always the least complicated of all. Stuffed animals, lego, card games.

Well, early video games were the one exception. Other than them though, "re-play" value was almost inversely related to technological complexity.

You might like reading these (I certainly did..) [1][2]

[1] http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/01/the-5-best-toys-of-all-...

[2] http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/12/6th-best-toy/

In my family, it was always the toys you built things with: wooden blocks, Tinker Toys, Lego, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets, plus clay. Also drawing and painting tools.

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