It is an amazing time to be a kid, particularly around holiday time. It is also an amazingly easy time to be a parent, grandparent, cool aunt or uncle who is shopping for that kid this time of year. It seems like all you have to do is enter a toy store, close your eyes, and point. Remotely-controlled toys has always been a hot tech, but it has definitely evolved.
HexBug Battleground includes robot spiders that battle one another, for around $70, you get two spiders and 15 walls to create your playing field.
“They fight with light, so they use lasers to go back and forth, they defend against each other, they can bounce light off the walls to attack each other so there’s strategy behind it,” says Brandon Adams of HEXBUG. “Ten hits will shut the other one down."
Drones and helicopters are huge this year. This may be a good warm up for little kids before buying them the more expensive ones. It’s the $30 Sky Rover Voice Command Helicopter.
“There’s 12 unique commands like ‘take off,’ ‘land,’ ‘turn left,’ ‘turn right,’ ‘go forward,’ ‘dancing in the air,’" Harold Chizick of Auldey Toys says.
And finally, for the child who wants to create their own toy to then control via remote these are part of the Thames and Kosmos Remote-Control Machines: Animal Science Kit. For $45, kids can create a whole host of robots, which they can skin as different animals.
“We build eight different models of different animals and you can use the remote to either make them move forward and reverse and they mimic that motion of the animal so there’s an orangutan that goes hand over hand on a rope, a dinosaur that kind of stomps along, you’ve got a crab that goes side to side," says Kim Colella of Thames & Kosmos.
Developers say in addition to learning robotics with these, because they do mimic animals, children will also get a taste of animal locomotion and biomechanics.