Slinky Science Optical Illusions Mini Lab - Toy Review

Slinky Science has some really exciting mini lab kits and so far, this is one of my favorites. It’s basically a spinning wheel (battery powered) in which kids place optical cards of different geometric designs to observe the effects of motion. The pictures change with the velocity the apparatus is spinning which makes for a pretty cool effect.

You can also make a Zeotrope movie machine with this kit. This is pretty much a simple spinning cylinder with slats in the sides that you view the pictures through while it spins. If you’ve never played with one of these, you’ll be amazed. And provided with minutes of entertainment. Okay, so kids will likely get more out of it than adults, but it as far as science toys go, this is a pretty clever kit.

And you can’t beat the price on this one. The Slinky Science Optical Illusion kit is about $10-12 at most stores but the educational value of this one far exceeds that. As with the other Slinky Science kits, I can wholeheartedly recommend this one.

Toy Review - Fun With Your Dog - Scientific Explorer

This kit won the Parent’s Choice Silver Medal a couple of years ago and as far as I can tell, this is still one of the more unique science kits around. While this is truly a science toy, it’s just as much a guide for experimenting with your dog. Okay, so you don’t do any experiments “on” your dog, it’s more that you do them “with” him. Kids get to answer questions like, “What’s on your dog’s mind?” by observing its tail, eyes and general body language. The kit comes with an ultrasonic whistle which is great for kids learning about some of the differences between a dog’s hearing and ours.

One of the really fun projects in this kit is to use the dog glasses so kids can see how a dog sees. We’ve always wondered if dogs just see in black and white, or some version of color that’s different from ours. With this  you can sort of find out for yourself.

Another fun project is to bake your own doggie treats. This comes with almost everything  you need for that. It’s kind of neat to alter the ingredients a bit and experiment with what dogs like best. Overall, this is a pretty fun kit and I can see how it won the Parent’s Choice Award. You can pick one up at Atomic Elephant Toy, one of the great distributors of Scientific Explorer Kits.

Toy Review - Inflatable Dinosaur Globe

This is a pretty neat toy put out by Safari Ltd., a company more known for their realistic animal replicas. They produce more dinosaur replicas than any other manufacturer so it makes sense for them to come up with something like this inflatable dinosaur globe. This particular toy is a bit flimsy, but it’s an inflatable dinosaur globe so I wasn’t expecting it to be too solid. It is a pretty clever toy though and makes a great economical display for any dinosaur lover’s room. What I like best about this one is the descriptive information it has on several dinosaurs (about 70 total). And of course it’s a globe, so children will not only learn about their favorite dinosaurs, but they will see where they lived as well. As far as science kits and educational toys go, for about $6, you can’t beat this one.

Uncle Milton Ant Farm Gel Colony

Like many of you, I like to read a few reviews about a product before committing to a purchase. I did this with Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm Gel Colony and was surprised to see so many bad reviews at Amazon. But for me, the lure of this ant farm was just too cool to pass up. I was thinking that most of the reviewers who gave it one star just didn’t know what they were doing, and no way would I fall into the same traps. First off, ordering live animals through the mail is always a tricky proposition. If you live in Anchorage and are trying to order their ants in December, they’re probably not going to send them. Now I can echo some of the comments that Uncle Milton’s weather requirements for sending the live ants is a bit stringent. I live in a moderate climate and ordered them in what I thought was warm enough weather. But after reading the reviews, I also went to another supplier and bought a couple more tubes for about $5 each (including shipping). This supplier had them to me in a couple of days and almost all of them arrived alive. My recommendation is to send in the certificate to Uncle Milton, wait a while and if it takes too long or you get ants in poor shape, go to AntsAlive.com and order them there. They don’t have the prettiest website in the world, but their service was great.

Another lesson learned… do read the instructions about putting the ants in the habitat. Put them in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes to get them to calm down first. Even then you have about 90 seconds to get them into the ant farm before they wake up enough to start crawling all over the kitchen counter. I did this with my wife upstairs, hoping I would be done before she came down. I wasn’t and was scrambling all over the place trying to catch the rogue ants. She wasn’t real happy with my choice of locations for filling the habitat.

Another recommendation- don’t put two entire tubes into one habitat. I did this (after reading the reviews about too many ants dying). Alas, my ants did not die and I had way too many for one habitat right from the start. I ended up buying and connecting the Original Uncle Milton Ant Farm to it just to give them some breathing room. I thought this would be a neat experiment anyway, learning which substrate the ants would prefer- the gel or the standard sand. It turns out, they don’t seem to care. they dug some great tunnels in both and seemed equally at home in either. I will say that they are much cooler to look at in the gel though.

Overall, I can recommend either of the Uncle Milton Ant Farms. They’re great science kits and if your expectations aren’t way too high regarding the whole process, you probably won’t be disappointed.

Triassic Triops-truly prehistoric pets

Several weeks ago I ordered some Triops online and decided to try them out with my son. All the information about these prehistoric pets (and there is a fair amount of information out there) said that they would hatch overnight and very soon start doubling in size every day. Now I’ve had Sea Monkeys many times growing up and thought these things would be about the same type animal. I was quite wrong there. While the Triops didn’t live as long as the typical Sea Monkeys, they did indeed start doubling in size at about day three. Granted, the supplier said that they only live a few weeks, so I can’t fault them for the creatures starting to die off after about a month. In fact, that’s actually a pretty good lifespan.

After about a month or so of watching these creatures, as amazing as they were, I found myself getting tired of changing the water which by then was starting to be pretty cloudy. It was however, a very nice lesson for my five year old in the life cycle of one of mother nature’s oldest creatures. Watching them hatch from almost nothing, grow to almost two inches, molt their exoskeleton a few times, and return to the almost nothing they came from really was an educational experience.

If you’ve tried Sea Monkeys in the past and would like something a little more interesting for your kids to study (you can at least see these animals), I highly recommend these. They’re a lot of fun, and the short duration of their entire life cycle makes them a great choice for younger kids whose attention span isn’t that long to begin with.

You can read more about them at the official Triops website and you can buy them from the Live Animal Kits section at Atomic Elephant Toy’s site.

My rating: 3.5 of 4 stars.