Cruising around the web last weekend looking for geosciencey Christmas presents, coupled with having 3 kids (aged 9, 5, and 3) to entertain and educate, I just realized I have a long list of awesome toys to share. Well, I say toys, but these amazing things are almost in a class of their own...

Bigshot camera

A full kit for a child to build his or her own camera, and it's only $89. Probably best suited to those aged 7 up to about 12. Features:

• comes with everything you need, including a screwdriver,
• a crank instead of a battery,
• multiple lenses including anaglyphic 3D,
• a set of online tutorials about the components and how they work — enlightening!

LittleBits

Epic. For kids (and others) that aren't quite ready for a soldering iron, these magentic blocks just work. There are blocks for power, for input (like this pressure sensor), and for output. They can, and should, be combined with each other and anything else (Lego, Meccano, straws, dinosaurs) for maximum effect. Wonderful.

Anything at all from SparkFun

... and there's Adafruit too. I know we had Tandy or RadioShack or whatever in the early 1980s, but we didn't have the Internet. So life was, you know, hard. No longer. Everything at SparkFun is affordable, well-designed, well-documented, and—well—fun. I mean, who wouldn't want to build their own Simon Says? 

And this is just a fraction of what's out there... Lego MINDSTORMS for the bigger kids, GoldieBlox for smaller kids, Raspberry Pi for the teens. I get very excited when I think about what this means for the future of invention, creativity, and applied science. 

Even more exciting, it's us grown-ups that get to help them explore all this fun. Where will you start?