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Comment by jmj42 | Hacker News Reader

I agree. We bought a mindstorms kit for me daughter a year ago (she has engineering aspirations).

I have to confess, I've had as much fun with it as she has.

Mindstorms is a brilliant product. They used it to teach robotics for undergrad IT at university. I built a machine that could play blackjack (light sensor moved over the pips of a playing card, discovering the card value). It was brilliant.

That is pretty cool. What did you do about face cards though?

They are all worth 10 and they do not match any of the pip patterns of the numbers. They have color in all the spots you would look for pips. Other numbers don't.

Exactly. I didn't even need to write any special code to deal with them, they just naturally come up as tens.

Did you just work this out or have you done something similar?

I have a 3 month old daughter. It is my secret wish that she'll want to play with this kind of stuff when she's old enough. If I keep the wish a secret then there's a chance she'll come to it on her own.

From experience if you want your kid to develop an interest in something you'll want to expose them to it and not just keep it to yourself. My daughters love Legos and Duplos. They play with them constantly.

My 5 year old is getting the Jabba's Palace set for Christmas this year. It's all she really wants.

Thanks, that's encouraging and you sound like a lucky father. I'll expose her for sure, I just meant that I don't want her to know that's what I want her doing so I avoid triggering her rebellious instincts.

That doesn't really start for a long, long time. If you just keep good toys around they'll take to them. If they really just don't like building then you find something else but in my experience just exposure to toys is a great starting place.

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