Boardgames are a great way to teach. There are so many to choose from now. Also there is nothing better than spending time with your kids. https://boardgamegeek.com/
Some people may not realize that boardgamegeek has ridiculously granular search capabilities- For instance, here are all recommended board games with a minimum recommended age of 6 sorted by rating: https://boardgamegeek.com/search/boardgame?sort=rank&advsear...
6 might be a bit on the younger side for it, but 10 definitely not. You learn to use a screwdriver and screws and basic mechanics. You can go all the way to elaborate designs.
It's a timeless toy, my father already played with it (looked like this back then: http://www.dalefield.com/nzfmm/slap/RoyalMeccano.JPG ) and so did I. Heck, even an adult can use these, I once made a distillery platform with height-adjustable burner with these. Really nice to slap together sturdy prototypes.
EDIT: Now that I'm looking at modern MECCANO, I feel like they have diverted too much from the original path. I'd rather have the basic old metal kit in the second image than a fancy MECCANO car consisting of oddly shaped plastic pieces.
My parents got me some MECCANO over a decade ago and were most annoyed that it didn't have enough 'normal' pieces for me to build other things with it. As such I built the car and thats that.
I was also going to say books. You could get books that aren't novels. For example, a book on how to do magic tricks, or a book about how the world works (e.g. earth science), or a book about different type of bridges, etc etc.
+1 for K'NEX. Legos always seemed so limited to me as a kid. K'NEX is much more oriented towards actually building things rather than just making neat things to look at.
I think the best gift for kids is still Legos. I spent hours building miniature cities, vehicles, homes, train systems, etc. as a kid. My children love them too. It's a great way to develop imagination and motor skills. I would personally avoid the branded sets, although that may just be my bias.
Growing up, I wished I could design my lego projects ahead of time with an interface as simple as what Google SketchUp has ended up coming up with. I wanted to be able to model it and order the required parts with a single click. I think they might have something like that now but they didn't have it back then.
I also had a strong bias against the sets, I saw them as completely against the spirit of Lego. Why would I want to build the one thing in the picture?
Now that I have a 5 year old daughter and we play Lego a lot, I see the value of the sets. They teach discipline, and following the instructions is very challenging for a child, requiring quite a bit of mental modelling, spatial awareness, patience and diligence. A feeling of satisfaction when complete, and a teachable moment when you encourage them destroy the built structure and combine it with your loose brick collection for later reuse.
there was a book getting started in electronics that use to be sold at radio shack. They had all sorts of basic projects from a battery using a potato to a transistor radio to an amplifier. I think it is still available online. I use to love making those projects when I was younger.
I still have the green cover one, I am planning on letting my child have at it when she is old enough. Right now we are just doing the snap electronics.
- Tiny Polka Dots might seem too basic, but counting is this complex topic that we forget because, well, we know how to count. Lots of downstream advantages of having the kind of secure understanding a kid can get from understanding counting inside and out. Tiny Polka Dots can help.
It's an obvious one, but I think there's something to be said for a simple three-in-one chess, draughts and backgammon set. The upfront cost is small but the long term benefits are vast.
I commend you for wanting to teach children alternatives to digital. While binary & hexadecimal are popular, especially if you want to get them into the nuts & bolts of computers, I'd be interested to hear any reflections on duodecimal. I'm not too big a fan of this counting method: https://mihaslekovec.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/duodecimal-... as it comes off as a bit too digitcentric for my tastes
Balanced ternary could be a real fun starting point-- getting negative numbers involved asap surely has some great benefits. I think if balanced ternary was exposed to children more often at an early age we'd have a lot of these new fangled type level numbers being balanced ternary. I was playing around with implementing such in Rust: https://github.com/serprex/lambdaski/blob/master/src/typenum...
Binary comes off as particularly weak when type systems are still resolving lambda terms / prolog logic as associative maps & trees. http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/topps/D-456.pdf benchmarks 5 as being an ideal radix perfwise, but that does seem implementation dependent
Math: Skat[1] is an awesome card game with rules that fit on the back of a single card (basic version) and that trains addition and multiplication. AFAIK it is/was accepted as a teaching tool in Thuringia's schools. (usually for 3 players, a 2 player variation is described in the WP-article).
Literature: A membership in the local library was enough for me.
Problem Solving: Chess and related board games; any kind of puzzles - I loved metal puzzles where I had to separate/join pieces (e.g. those found here[2] - not endorsing the shop, just the first hit on DDG).
A musical instrument. I would suggest not teaching them the traditional way, but in a more natural way. Check out the approach of Victor Wooten [0]. If you want things a little more structured, try Improvise for Real [1]. Both will teach creativity, self expression and more. Plus its fun!
No suggestions unfortunately, but I'm curious to know the motivation behind trying to find non-digital toys. Is there something we could do to bring the benefits of non-digital toys into digital ones or are the differences fundamentally irreconcilable?
Scrabble is great for vocabulary, although as you get better you'll learn strategic words and probably disregard their meaning (for example, I frequently use qi, qat, suq, qua but I can't define them)
The one thing I've never personally enjoyed about Set is that it's a "how fast can you do it" game that promotes quick thinking over other skills. My wife loves it, though, and I do agree it's a great game to teach patterns and set matching.
I totally understand where you're coming from with it emphasizing quick thinking. Unfortunately, that's part of the game and it can't be taken away. Even so, I love that game, I credit it with helping to stoke my interest in patterns and logic at an early age (love you mom!). Not necessarily related but Tangrams is another (math related imo) activity, a tiling puzzle that exercises spatial thinking.
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[ 0.69 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] thread6 might be a bit on the younger side for it, but 10 definitely not. You learn to use a screwdriver and screws and basic mechanics. You can go all the way to elaborate designs.
It's a timeless toy, my father already played with it (looked like this back then: http://www.dalefield.com/nzfmm/slap/RoyalMeccano.JPG ) and so did I. Heck, even an adult can use these, I once made a distillery platform with height-adjustable burner with these. Really nice to slap together sturdy prototypes.
EDIT: Now that I'm looking at modern MECCANO, I feel like they have diverted too much from the original path. I'd rather have the basic old metal kit in the second image than a fancy MECCANO car consisting of oddly shaped plastic pieces.
I transitioned from Lego to Knex once I got the Big Ball Factory at 11
http://www.leocad.org/
http://www.ldraw.org/
Now that I have a 5 year old daughter and we play Lego a lot, I see the value of the sets. They teach discipline, and following the instructions is very challenging for a child, requiring quite a bit of mental modelling, spatial awareness, patience and diligence. A feeling of satisfaction when complete, and a teachable moment when you encourage them destroy the built structure and combine it with your loose brick collection for later reuse.
Great toy.
http://www.melissaanddoug.com/
Tangrams are amazing, I would recommend presenting the silhouettes in varying sizes and at the other end of a room - makes it more fiendish.
1) Prime Climb https://www.amazon.com/Math-for-Love-Prime-Climb/dp/B00PG959...
2) Tiny Polka Dots https://www.amazon.com/Math-For-Love-Tiny-Polka/dp/B01N1UUHP...
- Tiny Polka Dots might seem too basic, but counting is this complex topic that we forget because, well, we know how to count. Lots of downstream advantages of having the kind of secure understanding a kid can get from understanding counting inside and out. Tiny Polka Dots can help.
We have Qwirkle and City of Zombies in the classroom. I hate them :) mainly because I am rubbish at them.
Balanced ternary could be a real fun starting point-- getting negative numbers involved asap surely has some great benefits. I think if balanced ternary was exposed to children more often at an early age we'd have a lot of these new fangled type level numbers being balanced ternary. I was playing around with implementing such in Rust: https://github.com/serprex/lambdaski/blob/master/src/typenum...
Binary comes off as particularly weak when type systems are still resolving lambda terms / prolog logic as associative maps & trees. http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/topps/D-456.pdf benchmarks 5 as being an ideal radix perfwise, but that does seem implementation dependent
My father wrote a song reflecting on our digital world: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw-au4sqKD2gWVJqOGFzSEVoakx... Stay strong & good luck
Literature: A membership in the local library was enough for me.
Problem Solving: Chess and related board games; any kind of puzzles - I loved metal puzzles where I had to separate/join pieces (e.g. those found here[2] - not endorsing the shop, just the first hit on DDG).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skat_(card_game)
[2] http://www.zoompuzzles.com/Metal-Puzzles_c_15-2.html
[0] https://youtu.be/2zvjW9arAZ0 [1] www.improviseforreal.com
Also the games by thinkfun.com (Rush Hour etc) are very good
A Pound of dice: https://www.amazon.com/Wiz-Dice-Pack-Random-Polyhedral/dp/B0... (I'd be keen to know if there's dice at a similar price in the UK)
You can then play something like Button Men (which could easily be rethemed to "Pokemon battle") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_Men