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Science Toys
For children, work is play. Even as adults, we learn more when we are engaged in something in a fun and playful way. Learning isn't meant to be serious. It is meant to be lighthearted and fun. After all, the more you enjoy something, the better you do with it. That is the thought behind science toys. A good science experiment toy can really get a kid excited about science like nothing else can.
Science toys come in all shapes and sizes. Basically, anything that kids use to interact with science in a playful way can be consider a science toy. One of my favorite science toys when I was a kid was a slinky. It is amazing how many principles of science it can be used to demonstrate. Although it is quite a simple science toy, it is very versatile. One of the most important things that they can use it for is demonstrating wave motion. By shaking a spring of any sort up and down, you can see how waves propagate through a medium. With a slinky, the demonstration is quite visual. Although theoretically you can use a jump rope, having something elastic works a lot better.
Of course, science toys don't just come in kits for older kids. There are other toys that help teach principles of science and mechanics as well. You don't think about it as science when you're at that age, but it is. For example, when I was about five years old I had a Capsella kit. With these science toys, I would get to connect gears to create working motorized vehicles. Although it would have been rather simple for an older kid, for a younger kid it demonstrated some pretty complex principles of engineering.
When I got older, I had an electronic projects kit. Of all the science toys I have ever owned, I think it might have been the best. Basically, it was a big box with a couple hundred components mounted on it. Each of them had springs where you could attach wires easily from one component to another. You could build about 200 different projects, and each project would illustrate something about electronics. Through it, I got to understand how circuits work. It taught me about oscillators, logic gates, resistance, capacitance, and many other fairly advanced concepts. As a matter of fact, it was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with electronic engineering. If I hadn't been able to play with it, I might not have discovered one of my greatest interests.
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