Xbox, Zombies, Lego, PC Boards and better mouse traps: educational high tech toys for Christmas

You'd be surprised how many high tech journalists are secretly Luddites (folks opposed to technological change). I'm not one of them. Having been born and raised in Silicon Valley watching San Jose turn from a cannery town to what it is today, I've always been a fan of high tech gizmos. I've also been an avid gamer (computer, console and board games) my entire life and have owned at least one game console since the days of Pong. About 5 years ago, I purchased an Xbox and have been building up a game library ever since. A couple of years ago, my kids showed great interest in trying out the Box so I purchased a Tasmanian Devil game for them. That was pretty much all it took to get them hooked on video games and it quickly became a minor obsession and soon just about every dinner conversation inevitably included one of my kids reporting in on some aspect of a video game they were playing or wanted.

Not wanting to turn my children into video game zombies and to steer them toward becoming more well-rounded folks, last Christmas I began looking for fun tech gifts that are more educational, more creative.

Last year, I purchased for my kids a really cool building set called Snap Circuits. Essentially it is composed of a giant breadboard and a bunch of different circuits that you simply snap onto the board (the connectors are button snaps like you see on windbreakers). You can also stack on other circuits to build radios, fans, sound sensors and a bunch of other devices. The kits come in a bunch of different sizes and each kit includes a number of projects you can assemble. But what's cool is that if you get one of the big sets you can build your own combinations of devices. You have to be weary of area and power budgets and all that—de ja vu, huh. Okay for many of you it may be too close to bringing work home but my kids dig it.

Another cool gift we purchased for them is the Lego Mindstorms. If you haven't heard of it, it's a robot assembly kit that comes with a programmable CPU unit, electric motors and sensors and bunch of Lego's—not just blocks, but gears, pulleys and rubber bands for drive belts. It also includes pretty straight forward software that allows you to program the unit. I originally purchased the "Mindstorms Invention Systems II" for my kids and they have a great time assembling robots and programming them do multiple tasks. For my oldest son's birthday earlier this month, I gave him the latest 32-bit CPU version, Mindstorms NXT and he's already mixing and matching Legos to assemble new robots. I was thrilled to see that National Instruments now provides a version of its LabView software to program Mindstorms NXT http://www.ni.com/academic/mindstorms/, so now I can give my kids (and even my grandma) a practical demonstration of the kind of software companies I work with and write about (well sort of, I cover EDA not embedded but demonstrating a Verilog simulator isn't that thrilling).

And while I’m at it, I have to give a nod to one of the coolest educational computer games I've ever played. It's called TIM, "The incredible Machine" and basically what it is is a puzzle game to create Rube Goldburg devices…better, wackier mouse traps. You are given objectives and a number of objects—like ropes, pulleys, gears, pipes, rockets, tennis and bowling balls, pies and of course cheese, to trap a mouse, get the cat to move to its left or have a ball land in a basket. What's cool is there isn't just one solution to these puzzles. Unfortunately, the game's not been updated in quite a while and doesn't work with my current computer (it was on a floppy drive). The version I had was for Windows 3.0 but it was last updated circa 2001 in a version called "The Incredible Machine—Even More Contraptions". While scanning Amazon.com I saw this PC game called "Crazy Machines: The Wacky Contraptions Game", which appears to be very similar to TIM. Looks like cool stuff.

I'm sure there are bunch of other cool educational high tech gifts like these so if you have any suggestions for the upcoming holiday season let me know.