Not only. In Italy there is a toy that explain the BCD (Binary coded decimal) with colored tiny balls. http://www.quercettistore.com/prodotti/rami About 30 years ago.. Sorry but this not happen only in Silicon Valley.
> My main objection to pushing STEM down to the diaper set is that it all seems to involve screen-based learning tools, and I am sure that little ones don’t need more screen time.
This thing seems pretty cool. On the whole, we probably need to have more of an awareness of how important tactile and spatial factors are in child development. But the top selling point, according to this reviewer, is that it protects your child from the "screen time" bogeyman? Spare me.
Scientific research quite strongly links excessive screen time to psychological problems in children. You can be spared from science, if you'd like, but it does no good to ignore real problems just because you want to stick your head in the sand.
Edit: And for the bogeyman's sake, if you'd like the "proof", that's what Google is for. This isn't some fringe view. It's about the same as asking me for proof that smoking is damaging.
The problem is that virtually all of the screen time studies don't apply to tablet usage as they were studying the effects of passive screen time such as watching tv. People have a tendency to group the two together as "screen time" but actively playing educational apps on a tablet is very different than passively watching tv. In time we should have a better idea what the effects are but right now tablets are still too new for any comprehensive studies to have been completed.
I've looked at Google and PubMed and was not impressed by what I found. Most "screen time" studies are primarily or exclusively TV-watching studies, and in many cases are in turn using that as a proxy for sedentary behavior in general rather than actually examining media consumption patterns. In short, they don't demonstrate that all screen time is equivalent, they just define the variable that way. That can be entirely justifiable from a study design standpoint, but also limits what the results can tell us.
The main source for recommending limitations on overall screen time for young children seems to be a set of recommendations published by the American Academy of Pediatrics [1], but they don't actually cite any research (or their citations are too well-hidden for me). The AAP recently published a release stating that new recommendations are coming soon and suggesting that the old guidelines are unnecessarily rigid and unrealistic, even to the point of explicitly stating that "The public needs to know that the Academy’s advice is science-driven, not based merely on the precautionary principle.". The top bullet point is "media is just another environment". This newer document generally advocates a nuanced approach that takes the nature of the content or activity as well as the social context of media consumption (e.g. whether parents are actively watching with the child) into account [2].
Correlation != causation. Is screen time per se that would create some issues with kids, or is it the lack of real communication between parent and kid?
I love to sit down and actively watch (i.e. point, name, discuss) a show with my 3 y/o son. When not excessive, I feel this is good for both of us.
> When not excessive, I feel this is good for both of us.
While I also agree that it doesn't feel wrong to experience something on a screen as a family, we should always be wary of "it feels good/right" as a reason for believing that something isn't bad for you in the long run. That's a slippery slope that has led to plenty of negative trends recently. It's far too easy for people to latch onto things that are good in moderation and let those things slip into over-saturation.
Unfortunately, screen time for young kids is more addictive for parents than cigarettes have ever been to anyone, and look how hard it was (is) to get people to cut that out.
Basically, you program a sequence of commands FORWARD, LEFT, RIGHT.
There is also a special command FUNCTION that executes a user-specified sequence of up to four commands.
Does it allow the FUNCTION command within the definition of the function?
If it does, there's a lot of non-trivial stuff with recursion to do
Big Trak also could fire it's "laser" programmatically.
My kids love it today - age 3 and 7. (Ok, I bought it used, since my parents had long ago donated mine to goodwill. Still, 35 year old toy works great.)
$180 on a toy for a 3 year old? No. We would absolutely play with this at our local library if they had one though. I love the screenless programming idea, embedding those concepts early.
it's a robot for urban tech-focused dual-income families with probably 1 young child, their first (which means everything they buy is top of the line). honestly they probably could have priced it at $199 or more.
Unicorn idea: As soon as you feel you have too much stuff/outgrown it, you give it to my startup that takes your hand-me-UPs! and cleans them and sorts them and then posts them to our tinder-like UI where you can browse based on categories and your "discovery prefs" are your kids age... you then look through a range of various baby hand-me-ups and swipe right to add to cart and have shipped to you.
you can return them later and if they are in good enough condition, you get a restock credit (think CrossRoads in SF (your lady friend may know this store)....
And yeah - why do you think diapers.com and Jessica Alba are all trying to get into the market...
If they want to spend money on their first born, there are far better, more rational ways to do it. $199 in a 529 plan turns into $2k by college time. $199 in used clothes or legos will go a lot further at that age.
at some point you need to come to grips with the fact that some people are just wealthier than you, and don't really care about that $2k in 18 years because they or their parents, or grand-parents, or great great great grand-parents already solved that pesky 'lack of money for the kids' issue.
you're projecting your own financial situation onto others in the demographic buying disposable $180 doo-dads for their kids.
For those who don't know, Robot Turtles is a board game that teaches programming concepts aimed at young children that you can pick up at Target or Amazon for like $25, for those of you who are balking at the high price of these robots.
I thought $180 seemed like a lot but it does look like you get a lot of stuff (including a simple robot).
A toy lawn mower, a wooden toy train set, a toy truck, and maybe another one or two toys is already pushing $100, most of which end up in a bin to be barely played with after the first day.
Hrrm, I misread. Looks like the $ doesn't go as far as I thought (for $180 you get the playset, not the world kit). Interesting concept but on second pass this is a little steep.
To everyone complaining about the price: It's pretty difficult to build a robot that does much of anything for under ~$40. And this isn't just a robot, it has All these pieces that communicate with each other.
Not sure if it's suitable for children 3 year old (mine are older already), but CS Unplugged, http://csunplugged.org/, is an inspiring collection of free (!) learning activities teaching Computer Science topics through games and puzzles using cards, strings and pencils and some paper. CS concepts like binary number representation, different types of algorithms, data compression and error detection are taught without programming code or the use of a computer.
Kinderlab Robotics' Kibo Robot (http://kinderlabrobotics.com/kibo/) also features a tangible, screen-free programming language where the instructions are wooden blocks that kids put together in a sequence. They are a funded startup shipping mostly to schools and museums, and the whole thing is backed up by a long line of research first at the MIT Media Lab, and now at Tufts. Previously, the founders created ScratchJr. Worth checking out.
I love the concept of building more hands-on toys to teach STEM concepts without requiring use of a screen, especially when dealing with kids. If nothing else, screens are expensive; blocks of wood, less so.
I'd really like to see where this goes, some videos of kids playing with it, some studies done to determine if the kids get out of it what the founder (Filippo Yacob) thinks they will.
