DailyDirt: Making Good Toys

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

While it's still summertime and schools haven't started up yet, kids are happily playing outdoors (hopefully) and not worrying about the coming onslaught of homework and common core initiatives. The stuff that kids play with has gotten more advanced over the years (not just iPads and gaming consoles), and some toys are really fascinating. Here are just a few things

• Here's a Kickstarter project to sell a water hose attachment that can make 100 water balloons in under a minute. It's not exactly rocket science, but apparently some plastic tubing and elastic o-rings is worth about 15 cents per water balloon. [url]
• Play Doh is generally safe to eat, unless you're severely intolerant to wheat gluten, because it's made of water, salt and flour (plus a bunch of other proprietary stuff). There are some recipes for making your own sculpting clay at home that might be more appetizing, but what can you expect from a toy product that was originally designed to clean soot from wallpaper? [url]
• Soap bubbles are fun, but how hard could it be to make soap bubbles a solid color with some dyes? Apparently, it's non-obvious to those skilled in the art (see US patent 7910531), and simply adding dyes to soap bubble solutions make mostly clear (regular) bubbles with all the dye collecting in a single spot on the bottom of the bubble. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: kid stuff, play doh, soap bubbles, toys, water balloons
Companies: kickstarter