Educational toy
"[8]: 172 Children improvised a wide variety of toys and games using whatever came to hand, including fences, barrels, sticks, stones, and sand.
[9]: 175–177 Both children and adults played games such as backgammon, dice, chess and cards, which helped to develop manual dexterity, memory, and strategy.
[11] In 1693, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, liberal philosopher John Locke asserted that educational toys could enhance children's enjoyment of learning their letters: "There may be dice and play-things, with the letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing; and twenty other ways may be found, suitable to their particular tempers, to make this kind of learning a sport to them.
[13][14] French educator Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont may be the earliest inventor of the jigsaw puzzle or "Dissected Map".
They proposed that such a shop should sell materials for a wide variety of activities including carpentry, handicrafts, gardening, chemistry, and natural history.
[19] Edgeworth even suggested that children be given a play area for loud and messy educational activities, to support the development of "the young philosopher", who she clearly expected to be well-to-do.
[17]In contrast to the Edgeworths, Isaac Taylor in Home education (1838) and Charlotte Mary Yonge in Womankind (1876) championed the idea of less structured, more imaginative play.
These early construction toy sets have remained in almost continuous production since then, and modern components are still compatible with the durable antique elements made more than a century ago.
[26] Montessori's curriculum focused primarily on tactile and perceptual learning in the early years, and was based on developmental theories and work with students.
[32]: 148 Meccano, Erector Sets, Tinkertoy, and Lincoln Logs all appeared in the early 20th century, and were promoted as developing fine motor skills, encouraging free play and creativity, and introducing children to engineering and construction ideas.
[24] Frank Hornby of Lancashire, England designed the construction toy Meccano in 1899 to encourage his children's interest in mechanical engineering.
The Erector Set contained girders and bolts that could be assembled into miniature buildings or other structures, and was acclaimed as fostering creativity in constructive play.
They were marketed in different sets, according to the types and numbers of pieces included, allowing them to be both interoperable and identifiable by difficulty level (e.g. junior, big boy, grad).
[24] In the mid-1950s, more explicitly engineering-themed construction toys appeared, including plastic girders, columns, and panels that could be assembled into a model curtain wall skyscraper.
[37][38] In the late 1960s, Fischertechnik introduced what would eventually become a versatile and powerful set of modular construction components, incorporating sophisticated pneumatic, electrical, electronic, and robotic capabilities.
The company's products also achieved some success in the hobbyist and school markets, including vocational education programs, but was overshadowed by Lego in the consumer segment.
As the amount of time spent at school increased, people began to see adolescence as a distinct life stage, with its own “youth culture”.
[49] During the Cold War, marketing slogans again reveal social tensions of the time, asserting that “Porter Science Prepares Young America for World Leadership”.
[50] Writers frequently lament that it is no longer possible for chemistry-set users to engage in the wide range of (sometimes hazardous) experimentation that attracted them to the field of chemistry as children.
The wealth of knowledge and entertainment that could be derived from simple and economical materials set a standard which would later be adopted by the pioneering science and technology center, the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
This setup allowed simple computations to be performed, similar to a mechanical slide rule, but the accuracy was poor and the components could not be reconfigured in any useful way.
[53] In 1961, Scientific Development Corporation introduced the Minivac 601, a simple relay-based electromechanical computer with a primitive memory, all designed by the pioneer of information theory, Claude Shannon.
In 1963, E.S.R., Inc. marketed the low-cost Digi-Comp I, which allowed children to construct a simple digital computer, composed entirely of mechanical parts operated by hand.
[24] With the software and hardware provided in the kit, which includes a system controller, motors, and peripheral sensors as well as ordinary Lego building blocks, children can create programmable robots.
Introduced by Eben Upton and the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the United Kingdom as an inexpensive option that would promote teaching of computer science and programming skills in lower-income schools, it has also become popular with makers and engineers.
[58] Some manufacturers regarded standard personal computers as an inappropriate platform for learning software for younger children, and produced custom child-friendly pieces of hardware instead.
Also, a sandbox environment is created, to disable the use of the keyboard (excepting some combination of keys that can only be typed by an adult), taskbar, and opening of other programs and screens.
[citation needed] Small mice, about half the size of a typical adult mouse, or large trackballs are used in toddler's computers.
Interlocking manipulative toys like Lego or puzzles challenge the child to improve hand-eye coordination, patience, and an understanding of spatial relationships.
Finally, a child in elementary school might use very sophisticated construction sets that include moving parts, motors and others to help further understand the complex workings of the world.
