If you buy a subscription you can switch between types of kits, in the age group I was looking at: "science and engineering" and "create and craft" and "geography and culture".
They have sales all the time, coupons online, and discounts for various things like giving them the email addresses of your friends who might be interested so they can be spammed.
This woman says her kids love the projects. The book gave them ideas. They started to see related things all around the house and they devised their own games based on what they read in the book. These books are an upgrade to the projects and they do increase the cost significantly.
Her con is that the projects are temporary. It's basically all cardboard and crap. Most will be tossed in a few weeks.
In my view that's a pro. They're projects to engage young minds constructively, not to create keepsakes that last the rest of their lives. Best to sweep it away and get on with the next thing. Plus you still have the booklet. And they can take what they learn and make something better.
She's from some place called Kanada or something. Don't let that throw you off.
This kit looks cool. I hope the boys get something like this. Maybe it's for an older group. Maybe I can call them and tell them to add to their subscription.
The man is like the Blue's Clues guy. He stops talking and the music takes over. I muted through the music then turned sound back on when the guy returned.
Tinker projects. That is the same line that goes to the boys. I hope they get this. It's a great complement to the Snap Circuits. You buy them a kit and they go through every single project in the kit. Through all that they pick up what's going on and design their own projects using parts not in the kit.
Barry said he bought them a Raspberry Pi kit. They hooked up a camera to a motion detector that alerts their cellphone when it takes a picture. They aimed it at a hummingbird feeder but misjudged. The wind moves the feeder so it was taking pictures of the feeder blowing around with no hummingbird around.
Gee. Too bad. A situation like that is impossible to fix.
4 comments:
Stuff like that is what kids need, especially today.
Something they not only do with their brains, but their hands.
Whatever happened to blocks? I played with blocks for days. Were they educational? No. So what.
Engaging boys creatively involves presenting them with opportunities to learn through experimentation and do something real, which means making cardboard stuff to be thrown away only goes so far. While getting on with what's next is needed some of the time, finding value and purpose, and recognizing success is also part of the process.
I know something of this as we homeschooled the SonsM this way, and both are now valued in their work as adults for their ability to bring practical and creative solutions to the table. One builds start to finish projects and the other expands on and reworks existing systems.
Where is interest being shown, and how might that interest be encouraged? When opportunity and interest come together things happen. It only takes a spark to light the fire, not months of preplanned projects.
K'nex were a hit with both SonsM, and we had (and still have) bins of them. Although they started out with kits, we bought the rest from garage sales and ebay. One ended up making a table-sized chess set and a series of fantasy aircraft with interchangeable power units (made from roles of quarters) and the other constructed a six-foot Ferris wheel without directions. These were on display in our basement for several years, the subject of much interest and comment from visitors.
I recently came across a photo of a city and road of colored blocks (from my mom's nursery school that she ran in the 50's) put together by the younger SonM who now manipulates blocks of information in IT. It may have been the only time he used them, but the really cool part from my perspective was that he'd created a whole story to go with them.
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