Toys to Build, Take Apart, Collect or Just Plain Stare At

An ostrich egg is fragile, and not the perfect gift for every child. But many children will love some scientific toy. For those of us who hate to be didactic but hope December’s gift will still delight in April, matching the gift to the child is a special challenge.

When it comes to giving scientific toys, I’ve found that there are are four kinds of children: collectors, builders, disassemblers, and patient observers. These categories are not necessarily permanent nor exclusive--this year’s collector may be next year’s observer. And there are taker-aparters who also like to put things back together again. But the child is father to the man, and most people remain remarkably consistent; child fossil collectors grow up to circumnavigate the globe, like Charles Darwin, gathering specimens throughout their lives.

A collector would want an ostrich egg. She’d put it carefully on a shelf alongside the robin’s egg found in an abandoned nest, perhaps inside the nest itself. Who hasn’t met the diminutive bug keeper with his shoe box carefully lined with leaves and grass, or the rockhound whose Tanzanian amber contains a 4-million-year-old fossilized ant?

Caters to Schoolchildren

The ostrich egg can be found upstairs at Deyrolle, 46, Rue du Bac in Paris. An institution since 1831, Deyrolle caters to schoolchildren as well as adult connoisseurs. The kids are there most weekdays counting out their francs, saving up for the iridescent blue-green butterfly from Uruguay, or for one of the embalmed vipers or spiders from Zaire. More affluent collectors can buy preserved bodies of much larger species, including horned owls, small monkeys and larger zebras. Tourists traveling light can find fine copies of the zoological charts that were used for years in every French Lycee.

Closer to home at 900 S. Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, Grieger’s offers everything for the rock collector, from mineral specimens to tools like rock tumblers and lapidary saws to work them. The prices vary as much as the inventory. There are agates for $1 apiece or African amethysts for $1.49. For a few dollars more there are geodes, the oysters of the rock world--hollow, round rocks that when opened with a diamond saw may reveal beautiful formations of multicolored quartz. Grieger’s also carries rare and beautiful crystals and rock fossils from all over the world. The generous benefactor can delight a collector with a rodent skull from the upper Pleistocene ($94), or a giant luminescent snail from the Cretaceous for $675.

The commercial world is framed around the builder. Where an older generation played with Tinkertoys and Erector Sets (still available and still worth giving), newer products will appeal to the junior high and high school set. The gift shop at the California Museum of Science & Industry in Exposition Park has Ikoso kits in different sizes and prices, topping out at the Superkit for $6.95. Wooden struts and plastic connectors meet to form geodesic domes, or stars that move like intricate cat’s cradles.

For kids with terrific hand-eye coordination, there are kits for carving and then coloring topological maps of the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier and Yosemite Valley ($4.99), a way to learn geography while creating a lovely piece of relief sculpture. For the nocturnal child, the one who suddenly wakes up when the stars come out, the Astrodome, at $8.95, is a put-together and punch-out model of the night sky, with constellations carefully marked.

What Makes It Tick

Disassemblers have a different kind of curiosity. The gift they want isn’t available in a toy or hobby shop. Some specialize in old telephones, others in clocks or typewriters. They like nothing better than to reduce these familiar machines to all of their component parts. Maintaining this curiosity into maturity, a one-time clock disassembler I watched grow up has now, at 25, acquired a laser, which he plans to take apart (and hopefully put together again) in the new year.

The patient watcher is a true delight. Start him on a Salt Crystal Garden ($12.95 at the museum shop), or for $9.95 at Grieger’s choose from quartz-like or fluorite-like crystals for older children (these include potentially dangerous chemicals). Or give her an ant farm and months later get a chronicle of the whole community’s progress.

For Older Children

If you have nostalgic feelings for times gone by, a classic like the Powertech Physics lab ($34.95 at the museum shops) makes a good gift for the older child who has probably asked for it. Likewise are kits to build crystal radios ($8.95), a human skeleton with the Visible Man ($17.95) or kite models of planes such as the Wright Brothers Flier ($15.95).

And for the children on your list who simply detest science, you can give scientific gifts surreptitiously in the form of a stocking full of astronaut food (dried ice cream in assorted flavors, $1.50), a space pen that writes upside down and underwater ($12.95), or a do-it-yourself fingerprint set that ought to allay any suspicions that they are being taught something when it’s play they’re after.