My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's why a 3 year old today can (with a bit of training) assemble 12+ LEGO sets.
Back in the day, when I was playing with LEGO Mindstorms, I thought the fact that you compile binaries and flash them with a USB cable was a feature, because it gave you full control. There was even alternative OS choices like [1]. I'm not sure I would have learnt the same amount with the modern version, which is centered around an iPad app with video tutorials.
Similarly, chemistry experimentation kits were amazing - until they started making them idiot-proof and removing anything that could be dangerous if you eat it. Nowadays, as an adult, I need a special permit just to refill the chemicals that I experimented with as a 10 year old ^_^
I have a bone to pick with LEGO. LEGO destroyed Erector sets. Erector sets were great because they were metal parts that you screwed together, and the machines you built look like machines. (My mom was reluctant to get me an Erector set, assuming I could not handle the tiny nuts and bolts. But I had no difficulty with them.)
There is two kinds of Lego (actually, a couple more but for this two will do). Lego bricks and Lego Technic. Lego Technic was conceived from day #1 to make proper machinery possible, the colors you are free to ignore. The old Technic sets such as https://thelegocarblog.com/2011/11/20/lego-technic-8860-car-... this one were really quite nice from a mechanical point of view.
Lego created the technic line because in Europe 'Fischer Technik' (from the factory that makes those plugs to hang stuff on the wall) was eating their lunch, especially in Germany and NL, two major markets for Lego. Fischer Technik was both more durable and far better suited to building machines than Lego and they had a whole line of electronic components to go with it.
Erector sets and Meccano were fantastic too, but not nearly as quick to build with, nor did they stand the test of time as well, clearly Lego did something right in making this stuff accessible.
So Lego did not 'destroy' anything, it all still exists it's just that the markets have shifted considerably and with Lego being heirloom grade plastic some of the bricks that we have here are now in their 6th decade and still being used by my kids.
I haven't thought about Fischer Technik for about a decade. Back in high school, there was a Principles of Engineering class (part of the Project Lead the Way curriculum). One of the projects was to make a marble sorter.
My group wanted to make a continuous belt marble sorter, rather than fully processing one marble then working on the next. Our chute to sort to buckets at the end didn't move very fast though. On the demonstration to the teacher, one of the marbles rolled along the seam between two buckets, only to fall into the correct bucket giving us 100% accuracy. He wasn't impressed with that part, but gave us the grade regardless.
In Uruguay and other spanish-speaking countries those were called "mecanos" (which, judging by other local customs such as calling sneakers "championes" and bubblegum "chicles" was probably a trade name) and they were great. I'm from 1978 and got to play with some sets from my dad (who's from '49). Besides being entertaining, they were a great way to develop mechanical affinity (if that's the right expression in English? I mean things like knowing how far to turn a screw so that it's as tight as it can be but you don't break the piece)
Sadly, you can't get them anymore here, at least not ones good in quality. There are similar building games but they all feel rather cheap and I know from personal experience they only survive a few repurposing of the pieces.
I do love LEGOs though, even though I played with copies in my childhood as my parents couldn't afford the originals. My main gripe with them is the sets. As a child, I just had a bunch of blocks and would build whatever I wanted. Now you can still buy "just bricks" but most of what kids get at stores are sets that tell them what to build. They feel more like 3D puzzles than building games.
Erector-like sets and LEGO-like sets can go together well though: I enjoyed demolishing my brick buildings with my mecano machines :)
In Uruguay and other spanish-speaking countries those were called "mecanos" (which, judging by other local customs such as calling sneakers "championes" and bubblegum "chicles" was probably a trade name)
Take a look at Cobi toys for the less garish models, although they aren't going to be like Technic sets.
I still have my old erector set for my kids, as well as several boxes of knex. When I was young, I eventually lost all interest in legos once I had an erector set and a large enough knex supply.
Those erector set electric motors were downright scary and I have many memories of bruised and cut fingers from making an airplane with a single odd numbered hole bar.
Is that really a bad thing? Minor things like that teach the kids how to handle tools and machinery, so they can operate safely the dangerous tools adults use. Like most boys, I had to learn the hard way to not put my finger in a light socket, and how to not stab myself when the screwdriver slips.
As my professor would say "We learn by doing!" I learned so much from my erector set: about the dangers of spinning objects, how gears mesh, and even seemingly minor things like how frustrating tiny screws and nuts are when you are still learning the required fine motor control.
I took the fine motor control for granted until I saw some young adults unable to get the blade of a screwdriver in the slot, then apply force to keep it in the slot and turn at the same time.
(Maybe that's why people keep reinventing the screw head, so I need multiple sets of screwdrivers. arrgh)
>My biggest concern about modern toys is that we have dumbed them down to work for the lowest common denominator. That's why a 3 year old today can (with a bit of training) assemble 12+ LEGO sets.
I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate the exact thing shown on the box? Why wouldn't I just ask for the thing pre-made instead? And furthermore the bricks were useless for actually creating things. It's nothing more than a slightly more advanced wooden block set.
K'NEX on the other hand was awesome. You could actually build things. Erector too. And those came with all sorts of cool accessories like electric motors and solar panels that you could use to build crazy contraptions. Sad that those things aren't as popular anymore.
There's a sort of zen pleasure in putting pre-designed Lego sets together, especially the more sophisticated ones where you discover along the way the little building tricks or "easter eggs" included by the designer.
Lego bricks certainly aren't "useless for actually creating things." You can make lots of cool things with Lego, and there's lots of creativity to be found in the Lego community, beyond just following the directions.
I do agree with GP that the listed ages on LEGO sets are absurd if taken as difficulty levels. My elementary age kids have no trouble with "18+" LEGO sets. I think the ages instead serve a marketing role: the 18+ rating gives adults permission to buy a toy.
> I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate the exact thing shown on the box?
1) The same motivation as a model kit... except what you build is intended to be played with and won't be (permanently) destroyed by play.
2) Same motivation as a puzzle.
3) Modern Lego instructions do a lot more hand-holding than the ones I had in the 80s and 90s did, so I'm not sure how true this still is, but the ones back then were basically a series of sometimes-pretty-challenging spatial reasoning puzzles. So anyone who enjoys that kind of thing might enjoy assembling Lego sets.
4) Once assembled, you could customize, re-dress, and mash up the sets in ways you couldn't with other toys, and fall back on the directions to fix anything you screwed up too badly, if you wanted to get back to baseline. For example, one of the "good guys" bases from the Pirate series spent more time as a marine research base than it did hosting swashbuckling shenanigans, for me. My big castle sets would grow castle towns from a mix of smaller castle-series sets and custom builds on big flat plates. That kind of thing.
5) You could really destroy a Lego toy built from a set, then put it back together. You couldn't smash apart any bit you liked of an ordinary airplane or ship or castle toy and not ruin it permanently. With Lego sets, you can.
For my part, I've never understood people who don't understand the appeal of Lego sets, because I find the appeal so multi-dimensional and obvious.
[EDIT] FWIW I do find a lot of modern Lego sets worse for some of these purposes than the ones I had as a kid. They've leaned more into the "model" side of things and less into the "play". Exposed nubs get covered up (looks better on a shelf, or on the box photo, that way) so you have to tear pieces off to attach other things to it. Builds are incredibly fiddly and use tons of really tiny bricks even for basic things like a wall, so re-building from memory or a little simple reasoning after destroying a small part of a set is now far more difficult (I suspect CAD run amok is to blame for this one).
The best experience with legos is if you had older siblings who got the legos. Then by the time you got the hand me down legos, you ended up with just a big bin of random parts, no sets, no manuals. I would create elaborate bases or freighter style space ships for playing with my other toys, play with them for a while, then take them apart and make something else. It was kind of like minecraft is with kids today, but with your two hands.
I also loved K'NEX. I built so many things, expanded the Big Ball Factory with additional logic gates at the top, got hands on experience playing with gear ratios, tower cranes, and built vehicles to race against my brothers down the stairs (of course the K'NEX man had to stay intact!).
It was fun building chunks of a big structure and assembling them together, and inevitably having to rebuild a chunk because of some missing pieces.
I do wish they built a control system akin to Lego Mindstorms though. Turning motors on and off manually was fine, but I really would have love to to be able to, for example, build my tower crane such that it could rotate via motor, and have separate controls for lowering the bucket and moving the load closer/further from the tower.
Back in the day, when I was playing with LEGO Mindstorms, I thought the fact that you compile binaries and flash them with a USB cable was a feature, because it gave you full control. There was even alternative OS choices like [1]. I'm not sure I would have learnt the same amount with the modern version, which is centered around an iPad app with video tutorials.
Similarly, chemistry experimentation kits were amazing - until they started making them idiot-proof and removing anything that could be dangerous if you eat it. Nowadays, as an adult, I need a special permit just to refill the chemicals that I experimented with as a 10 year old ^_^
[1] https://brickos.sourceforge.net/