The Best Educational Toys -- Batteries Not Intended

It is easy to imagine how electronic toys could teach. Computers have improved to the point that they can manage complex tasks, such as keeping track of lessons, errors, skills. As well, computer graphics and sound can provide detailed auditory and visual cues.

Even so, electronics cannot replace old toys as educational tools. Psychologists have studied children's play for nearly 100 years and found that the best play involves language, imagination, cooperation with others, and choices of how to play, use toys and spend time without prompts or directions from others, especially adults.

Imagine the simplest possible toy, a red playground ball you might remember from elementary school days. Kids with a playground ball must decide what game to play -- soccer? Dodgeball? Kickball? Foursquare? How will they decide? Vote? Negotiate? Divide the time between different games? Left alone with a ball, kids need to develop concepts of justice. When kids play with a ball, they need to develop rules, taking account of differences in ability and age. They need to follow rules out of sense of fun and fairness instead of the threat of adult-imposed consequences. This is a complex, rich, and sophisticated life lesson that no machine can reproduce, and adults can only spoil.

For under ten dollars, your child can literally have a ball, and then practice statecraft, diplomacy, labor relations, and leadership. When she is done, she gets to actually play ball and practice spatial perception and large muscle coordination, while building muscles and aerobic endurance. Who needs a computer anyway?

The best toys put kids to work, not machines. Have you ever seen an electric jeep for kids, powered by a motorcycle battery? This is an expensive waste of child muscle power. Tricycles and bicycles are incredible exercise machines. In fact, adults join gyms and pay good money to ride bicycles that go nowhere. Real bicycles are a form of transportation. Kids are liberated from their driveways and can go places. For many years, childhood obesity was very uncommon. Teenagers who drove cars and hung out in family rooms had bellies; kids with bikes did not. What happened to change that? Maybe the the creation of the Internet and video games?

Good toys require brainpower and muscle power. Children supply the energy and the creative will, not the machine. For example, if you own Crayons, or tempera paints, or watercolor paints, or pencils and a sketchpad, they sit there waiting for you to animate them. No programmer or game designer animated them for you.

Musical instruments such as harmonicas, drums, and recorders similarly wait until you play them. An Ipod will play someone else's notes -- a recorder plays yours.

Good wooden kindergarten blocks are math and physics lessons in a box. They,like Leggoes, have a basic block that represents the number "1." Every other block is a fraction or multiple of that block. Blocks are all about using math to design three dimensional objects. The iron laws of physics will apply to what you build. Everything falls. Gravity wins. High walls need buttresses. Some shapes are inherently more stable than others. For about 50 dollars, your child can be an architect, builder, and engineer.

Board games demand complex reasoning -- evaluating probabilities, determining likely outcomes of different choices, planning moves, creating strategies. Kids practice emotional skills too: They must cope with disappointment, learn to wait for their turn, treat other players with courtesy, win or lose gracefully. For about 20 dollars, your child can practice skills that seem to be disappearing in your neighborhood.

Books are the ultimate educational tools. They teach about our common culture, about words, about history, science, biography. Books ignite imagination. They expose kids to ethical concepts when characters need to make moral choices. Reading to children is a wonderful gift that only one in four children receive.

If you really, really want to give a child an electronic gift, walk right past the video game aisle, and while you pass it by, notice how boring the aisle is with its countless identically sized boxes All your child's friends have video games anyway, so he will not miss them at home. Try buying a camera and Photoshop. Give your child a video recorder and inspire a young Speilberg. Buy them a digital voice recorder and ask them to interview the elders in your family. Try out musical composition or animation software. Look for gadgets that are as dumb as possible, and require the kids to be smart as they can be.