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Toys

Move Over Lego, Enter Atollo 288

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-isn't-that-cute dept.
FortKnox writes: "Through the blessed portal memepool, I stumbled across the new arcitecture toy, Atollo. These new building toys can build any type of shape with only two pieces. The two pieces can be connected in many different ways allowing both rigid and flexible connections. " MMmm. Toys. Anyone else remember Construx? I loved those things too.
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Move Over Lego, Enter Atollo More

Move Over Lego, Enter Atollo

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  • Connex? No way... it's all about the tinkertoys.
    aw yeah...
    • How about Mechano? THAT was cool stuff!

      MadCow
    • He said "Construx." Construx are similar to Connex in that they have clips rather than the Lego-like pegs. However, as cool as Construx are, they are very weak. They are prone to breaking because the beam cross sections are squares with one edge missing. It's also difficult to make anything with Construx that involves anything other than right-angles.
  • Until then, Legos still rule the roost
  • Can it compete with Mindstorm?

    (Can't tell....site slashdotted....must refresh till wee hours of night.....mmmmmm.....fresh dognuts.....)
  • Anyone else remember Construx?

    Somewhere, probably still in my parent's attic, I have a huge box full of Construx. When I was a kid I made little carts and buggies, hooked them to my Chihuahua, and made him pull them around the house. Great fun, that Chihuahua was...
  • Lego my Atollo.

  • you kids have it nice (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dr. Awktagon ( 233360 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @07:46PM (#2322864) Homepage
    All these new fangled toys.. kids have it nice today. When I was young, I had to build my own computer out of a pile of sand and some scrap metal!

    Anyway it's always nice to see toys whose instructions don't consist of "Attach the Cockpit module to the Wing module. Your new F-16 model is now complete! Enjoy!".
  • News for Nerds. Stuff you can never get to.

    Maybe I'll get through in a week.

  • construx? (Score:3)

    by Telek ( 410366 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @07:47PM (#2322871) Homepage
    loved it. What about robotix? That stuff was really damned cool. You could build all sorts of mechanical things that would do stuff. My friends and I used to have wars where we'd build stuff with different brands and then war it out. construx usually always won.

    Man, back to the good old days. Anyone else remember some others? I can't remember them all. I remember one that actually had screws and metal bars that you could bolt together in all different shapes and sizes, and motors too, but I can't remember the name of it.
    • was it Erector set?

    • Construx, indeed, rocked. My parents too have a big heap of them in a box in their attic. However:


      I remember one that actually had screws and metal bars that you could bolt together in all different shapes and sizes, and motors too, but I can't remember the name of it.


      "Erector"? I can't believe that you'd forget the name of the construction-type toy that made me giggle most... :) I hated that thing, because it took forever to thread all the nutsonot the screws. If they'd used some kind of expanding fastener (like hollow-wall anchors, perhaps) so I dind'thave to thread and unthread stuff or hold a screwdriver/wrench/2+ parts with only 2 hands, I'd have liked them almost as much as construx. As it was, though, construx rocked.

    • If it's what I think, it's Mechano (or something, in swedish, it's Mekano anyway) - all sorts of thin metal bars and sticks and wheels. You could easily hook motors from old casett-recorders to it, too. Oh those times!
    • Construx beat Robotix? You're out of your fscking gourd! I had all of the generation 1 Robotix sets when I was a kid, those things were serously tough! I had a small screwdriver(from a eyeglass repair kit) that I kept with them to pry the damn things apart with. Once you put something together out of these, man, it stayed together. The motors had more torque than many small cars today, but the deciding factor would have to be "Argus's Jaws" This was a mock-up dinosaur head which could hold a motor and would open and close it's jaws on things. Man, this thing had some powerful chompers, I still have scars!

      Come on, anyone else remeber the R-2000(Argus) Robotix set? Anyone else feel that bite?

      Steven
      • I had the R-2000, but never let it bite me. I let it bite down crooked on a GIJoe once, damn thing had so much torque that, with the left and right sides of the jaw not biting evenly, it fucking pried itself off the motor and its jaw went flying. It wasn't broken, amazingly. Which kinda hinted to me that if I ever got my hand caught in there, a) the motor would not stop until it had torqued the jaws apart, and b) the plastic not break until it had gone through my hand. So I treated it with a bit more care after that. :-)

        • I would just like to say that that is the funniest thing I have read on /. since this whole WTC thing happened.

          Brah. Vo.

          - Rev.
    • For all these "alternative" construction toys, nothing has ever beat LEGO. I don't think that it's necessarily because LEGO has a head-start, although that's sure an advantage for them. No, I think LEGO has the simplicity factor nailed down better than anyone else.

      I mean, come on. BRICKS. How much simpler can you get than a plain rectangular prism, except for the alphabet cubes everyone gets as babies? You stack them, they get taller, and its easy to visualize how several of them combine. Right angles and multiple planes and voila, you have a house. A little more creativity, and you have a car or a plane. And so on.

      The sets get more "multidimensional" as you progress, but that's the beauty of LEGO. They can stay simple or get increasingly complicated depending on your preferences. At one end, you have Duplo bricks; at the other, Technic Star Wars droids that you can program with MindStorms. LEGO is only as complicated as you want.

      Every other type of construction set, however, seems to promote flexibility at the expense of simplicity. Sure I can use these two pieces to build (supposedly) anything I want, but I can't really visualize how that's supposed to work. And I'm a grown adult with a talent for abstract visualization; how's a child supposed to accomplish it? Once you've built everything in the booklet you're given, you're left to your own imagination, and with these pieces I don't have any.

      I'm convinced that many of these "alternate" construction sets are purchased by teenagers and adults, people who like construction and who want to "wow" their friends and family with elaborate creations. They're supposed to be sold to children, but they don't have the visualization skills to make a dinosaur or a Formula-1 racecar with them. All they really want, upon opening the package, is to be able to build a house.
  • I'm not banking on the massive success of this...

    For one, half of the fun of Legos was all of the different pieces. If you just have two pieces, your creativity is impaired.

    Besides, all of the different pieces keep kids buying more and going back to the store, which bodes well for the future of the company creating said parts.

    *sigh* I miss construx. The difference in construction abilities between construx and legos was cool. You could construct different sorts of items with different attributes in each set. And both had mechanical/motorized/lit up capabilities.

    What happened to them, anyways?
    • you bring up a good point: all different construction toys have different attributes, lending themselves to different kinds of structures.

      for example, i just bought myself a tub of k-nex. they're neat, and you can do weird things with them you couldn't with lego (they come with _gears_! gears, i say!), nor as well with construx. But they have little to no inherent stability. when you build something out of lego, it's pretty damned solid. construx wasn't exactly perfect (the longest bars would torque a little.. i snapped quite a few of them building little throwing devices). but knex just wobble. you have to design structure in, as opposed to just expecting it to be there.

      lego has very few basic blocks. they're all the same basic thing, serving the same basic role. the same goes for construx and knex. sure, they all have neat "accessory" pieces (like the cool little translucent lego pieces, or the pulleys and cockpits of construx, or the gears of knex), but they're still fundamentally basic.

      this toy sounds very similiar, but with more flexbility (haven't seen it yet, /.ed). it sounds like this toy is actually more flexible than lego, and will hopefully spur on more creative designs exercising that flexibility.

      -jbm, just back from a bike ride, so probably not quite lucid.
    • If you just have two pieces, your creativity is impaired.

      Yeah, with computers, having only two different types of bits... creativity is impaired. Having 3-bits would be ohhhh sooo much better! I could express so much... err, wait, I can't express anymore with 3-bits than I could with 2-bits. Now wouldn't ya think the same applies to Atollo?
  • Anyone remember Spacewarp? You could build rollercoasters with plastic tubing and ball bearings? Anyone know if you can still buy Spacewarp? I'd love to buy one!
  • I have a large collection and I play with them every now and then. I have a working gatling gun that I made with Construx.

    I wish there had been something like Mindstorms with Construx. I'd be able to do tons of cool stuff with that...

  • atollo.com slashdotted. (Score:4, Informative)

    by LinuxSpaz ( 413483 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @07:55PM (#2322914) Homepage
    I am a big kid so i still play with Lego. It appears as though atollo.com was slashdotted though, so a quick google search found this link:

    http://kidscience.about.com/library/weekly/aa11100 0a.htm [about.com]

    Enjoy!
  • I loved LEGO as a kid. I spent countless hours making computers, houses, all manner of gun, and, of course, the ubiquitous robot.

    Now that I have kids of my own, they play with LEGO, and I don't even recognize the toys I grew up with.

    I mean, sure, it's cool to have the Star Wars sets and what not, and the little lego men look really cool and all, but where's the creativity? Unless you have serious cash to drop on the Mindstorms, the sets are so specialized that you can only make one thing out of them.

    I think that Atollo is a paradigm shift in construction-based toys, returning the focus to the user's creativity, rather than ability to follow diagrams in an instruction book.
    • Maybe, but I still think the R2D2 from the Light Side Mindstorms kit is the coolest R2D2 model available, anywhere. It's functional and abstract at the same time.

      I should put mine back together, bung in some batteries and put it infront of my torch on flash mode.


    • "...the little lego men look really cool and all, but where's the creativity? Unless you have serious cash to drop on the Mindstorms, the sets are so specialized that you can only make one thing out of them."

      Ah, the old "nowadays Lego has too many specialized pieces" complaint. In a few cases justified, but doesn't anybody remember what their early Lego creations looked like? I'll answer that: "crap". Yes, they looked like crap. The basic rectangular bricks are versatile, but if you are trying to make more sophisticated creations or "model-quality" recreations of actual vehicles or buildings, they're not sufficient. Even as a kid I *loved* all the specialized pieces, because without them you couldn't build a Cylon raider or an X-wing fighter or a dump truck that actually dumped. If you're still unconvinced see Brickshelf [brickshelf.com] to see how creative one can be with the "single-use" parts.
        • if you are trying to make more sophisticated creations [square bricks] are not sufficient. Even as a kid I *loved* all the specialized pieces, because without them you couldn't build a Cylon raider or an X-wing fighter

        The difference being that in the olden days, you had to figure out how to do it, you had to search for solutions. Now you open the box, and bingo, there's your (Star Wars(tm) X(tm)-Wing(tm))(tm). Why bother buying a LEGO one?

  • Construx (Score:2, Funny)

    by x136 ( 513282 )
    Ahh.. Construx... That stuff was fun. I remember looking through the little booklets that came with the sets and seeing that you could buy sets with enough parts to build huge bridges and the like. Construx was cool in that the stuff you made was very rigid, so dune buggies didn't shatter when they flew off the curb... :)
  • Construx was a lot of fun, actually. I still cherish a box of it somewhere back in a closet. I especially liked the fact you could easily build bigger structures with it than with lego... And of course you could have a nice motor with it and build a robot.
  • I always liked Construx a lot more than Legos when I was younger, and still have a huge box of parts in the closet. The only problem was that (at least where I lived), it was almost impossible to find the kits and stuff in stores.

  • Something "missing" with these (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KernelHappy ( 517524 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @08:03PM (#2322949) Homepage
    Personally I think the reason why Legos remain the king of building toys is because they appealed to both kids who enjoy technical stuff as well as kids who just want to play. Toys like connex, capsela, robotix and even erector sets always seemed to appeal to more technical kids (like myself), and Atollo seems to be stuck in that same market. These toys may require more technical thinking, or dexterity than the average child may have. On a side note, is anyone else bothered by Lego's apparent need to make 200x the custom, one use only, decorative pieces? I bought the latest super car (8448) and have to order the silver champion only because I have an addiction, but I really don't like all these new pieces that are just for looks. It seems like their technic models are becoming less substantial.
    • I agree with you, these are lacking. They are lacking the same thing every other construction toy lacks. Simplicity. Sure there are only two pieces, but way too many ways to connect them.

      The advantage of Lego is that it is SIMPLE. There may be a lot of different pieces, but conceptually they are all the same. You always connect them the exact same way. That is their appeal, you can sit down and put them together right away, starting to explore the construction and creativity involved immediately, instead of having to first explore the ways to put them together and how they interact. Lego is a classic. It is simple. Anybody can pick it up and make stuff.

      So while this looks like it has possibilities, I don't see it replacing Lego, just like other things have yet to replace lego.

      Now if just Lego would go back to the basics instead of doing all these specialized kits.
  • Ingenuity. Thats all you need. Construx was a great toy and it had no fancy AI programability or motors. It had glow in the dark, and boy was that fancy! Another great non-powered toy was kinex. It had some great plans for cars, the only thing was it had no motor. I spent my time with the large rubber band that came in the kit and made my own windup powered car. The only thing was that I would wind it up so tight that the plastic parts would snap. The best part was getting as much power out of the plastic before it would snap.

    • Construx was a great toy and it had no fancy AI programability or motors

      I had a construx motor, I think my parents bought it seperately. It had a number of connectors on it's surface and 2 motorised wheels on each side (1 large, 1 small). There was a 3 state controller attached by a roughly 18" cable. And yes, I immediately used it to create a robot (although for some reason bipedal construx robots don't walk very well).
  • Right on... the glow in the dark features of contrux were awesome... I used to build body armor for myself as a kid with the snap on siding. Also Does anybody remember Capsella (I think thats how you spell it)??
    • capsella(sp) rocked! i wondered if anyone was going to post about it.

      oh man, i always wanted the one that you could control with the IR remote. or the one (the 400 series?) that came with the big yellow pods to float your construction with.

      :)

      i remember one day, about 2 or 3 years after they quit making them, i saw the black IR robot at Service Merchandise in a badly damanged package on sale. i was going to get it, but back then i was little and didnt have any money :(

      i wonder...can buy these things on ebay because i would buy them again in a heartbeat. would prolly help to know the right spelling..
  • I mean would want to make a wall out of those, much less anything fun.
  • To be perfectly honest, everyone has tried to capture what Lego has, and the harder they try the worse these toys get. Can I really see my 20 month old son having half a clue how to use these? Last night we opened a fresh new bucket of Duplos and he was putting near stuff together in no time. What am I supposed to do with these? Try to show him how the @#$@ing ball bearing fits in the socket!?

    Not so with Legos. Legos are rectangular (an easy shape for kids to understand), they fit together one way (no bending shit backwards to make a wheel or something equally stupid), they go together easily and stay, and they teach kids things such as spatial relationships and manual dexterity while allowing them to be creative. The last point is especially important because most other toys REQUIRE these skills BEFORE they can be used! You should have seen the smile on my son's face when he figured out how to put those Duplos together!

    And hey, when he gets older and wants to create big toys to go along with his Lego toys, I'll get him some Constructs.
    • Exactly! That's the first thing I thought when I saw it, "It's that Denny's thing".

      When you build something w/Legos it often looks like what you are trying to build.

      When you build something w/these things you kind of have to let your eyes go out of focus to figure out what it is. Sort of like those 3d posters that were all the rage a bit back.

      I'll stick w/the legos- thanks.
      • Now thats being open minded! Most of the Lego models that you are talking about require the use of many unique custom made pieces. That that to the extreme, and for each model, you have one custom premade piece. What is the fun of that?

        When I was a kid, I never got the designer lego kits with all those custom pieces. I just got one of those HUGE bucket-o-legos that contained tons of various sized rectangular pieces. Thats where the creativity is at, and in fact, Atollo's is interesting for the same reason that electronic computing is interesting: two bits.
  • I still have all of mine. Really, the best part of building anything with Construx was to see how much punishment it took to destroy it.
  • Yeah, who needs electronic CPUs for mindstorm like projects, and why use chemical batteries? I want to see a fully mechanical robot that stores energy as gravitational potential.
    • So now we have robots going around independent of conventional sources of energy for sustinence knocking everthing they see over so they can capture the gravitational potential

      Think it wont happen just wait till *you* get knocked over by some contraption just so it can recharge
      • I have always wanted to see someone make a nice accurate software kinetics simulator where all kinetic calculations preserve kinetic energy (hence no friction), and then populate it with artificial purely-mechanical life... and like you said, the life forms would compete for kinetic energy of any kind, even energy stored in other objects as gravitational potential energy.

        I mean, you guys saw the WTC buildings fall. It takes allot of energy to shoot dust and other junk the distances it was shot from those buildings. Its all because of the massive amount of energy stored in those buildings in the form of gravitational potential.

        If such life is possible, then the system would keep some level of order, as opposed to decaying into chaotic moving pieces... and who knows, more sophisticated life forms might evolve.
    • ...and after you drop it, it does a realistic simulation of a robot crashing into the ground and breaking into a thousand pieces.

  • How about Capsela? (Score:2, Informative)

    by codon77 ( 252733 )
    This was one cool toy from the early 80's: Capsela [constructiontoys.com]. Had hours of fun making boats, tanks and cars, all from the same kit. Each item was a spherical module that could be attached to other modules such as motors, various gearing mechanisms, pumps, clutches....a really good variety of devices.

    Now I wonder what happened to that kit that was under my bed?

    • Capsela! That was the name of the things.. I was trying to remember the name of them while I was reading the lego thread... I used to make boats out of them and drive them around in the pool since you could make the motors up high and use drive-shaft modules universal-joint modules to drive the propellers down under the water...
    • i always thought they were more fun than legos, definately more educational (especially the normal legos that didnt do much). they were lego technics before they even existed. plus, they had cool stuff like propellers, and floats and stuff. it was neat that what you bult would actually run on its own...

    • Dude, Capsela rocked the body that rocks the party! I'd build cars that turned into boats and shit. I loved that thing. The only thing I hated was that there was no way to make two motors run at the same exact speed. Well that and the fact that when I was a kid rechargeable battery technology sucked ass.
  • Xmas is coming up; are these too complex for my 3-year old niece?

    BTW, I think I would have liked these much more as a child. Some people might think that Legos are better because they have more variety of pieces. I think the reverse is true: the reason I liked Legos as a child was because I figured out how to build things that were not drawn for me. I NEVER attempted to build the demonstrations they had pictured on the box. With these things, I would have been able to express even more creativity.

    I think Legos were a significant contributer to my geek status: now I put together code in much the same way that I put Legos together. I enjoy building things that nobody has ever thought of.

    Am I wrong trying to pass these values onto my niece? I think I would rather buy her geek things that stretch the mind rather than clothes or dolls, but then, am I just passing my values onto her?

    • Duplo, of course :-)

      My 3 year old nephew loves 'em. And tries to play with (i.e., destroy) his big brother and big sister's creations with regular Lego. When they were visiting from Germany this summer, I hauled out my old Legos (thanks, Mom) and the two older ones played with them for hours. I even got the old Lego train to work.

      All three of them love Lego. There are differences in how they play with them, but I think the differences are more to do with personality and age differences than gender. By all means...help stretch your niece's mind with toys that make her think. Lots of people will likely get her clothes and dolls...be the *fun* uncle instead :-) When she's a little older, you can take her to Legoland in Denmark or in California, which ever is closer. Or do other stuff she likes, like chase butterflies, look at tide pools or whatever.
  • I remember 12 or 13 years back when I got my first set of construx for christmas. I loved them, and the first night I had them, I had a fully functional working crane built. They were a blast.

    Anybody else remember building stuff like that? Or am I just wierd? :)
  • First off here's a link to the various cached pages at google Here [google.com] Don't know how much of a help they'll be though...

    &nbsp&nbsp Legos were by far my favorite toy when I was a kid. The reason was because it was a fun challenge to see if you could make something with just 20 (or so) basic pieces (of course then there were the specialty legos which there are now a million and a half) But if these allow you to make any shape, what's the point? It takes all the challenge and imagination out of looking at that pile of disjunct legos on the floor and seeing what it could be: a Deluxe Super Moon Skimmer with missle ports... oh and a... It was fun cause it was hard and it took your imagination. I kinda pity the kids who grow up today (or didn't grow up) without legos. Those were the happy years (this is kind of ironic as I am only 20 but hey)
    &nbsp&nbsp Now I stare at a blank screen and a keyboard and see that quicksort function it could be =)
  • If you guys want to find great new or classic toys, check out Dr Toy's site [drtoy.com]. Written by a Dr that specializes in toys.
  • These are toys we are talking about here!
    Come one people, you are not 9 years old anymore.
    Why is this even here on /. ?
  • coming in at around just over 10 cents/piece.

    It seems to me that lego some lego kits come it at upwards of 50 cents or more per piece.

    Always was a rip off. Not that it's not fun.
  • Perhaps they built their Web server out of some of their own toys?
  • A toy is not a toy unless you can take it into the bath tub with you....err... hopefully you are familiar with capsela [constructiontoys.com] lest you think I had some other sort of pseudo-submersible toy... er.. ah never mind...

    E.

  • I wonder if these still aren't available somewhere and relatively cheaply.

    These were absolutely great!

    A friend built an 8 foot told humanoid construct. It didn't quite move a great deal, but it was fascinating at the time.

    I myself constructed a small two foot electric chair. I took the aluminum from cans and took strips along the arm rests and legs to for conduction. Then later cut the leads from the lights and battery construx thingie. It was quite interesting... mom didn't agree. It was dismantled later to end her shouts.
  • Would this be pronounced boring old "Ah-tole-oh" or exciting hispanic "A-toy-o"? =)

    It's got "toy" right in the NAME, it has to be good! =)

    -Kasreyn
  • Just recently I came across a toy with little rods with magnets at each end (edges) and ball bearings (verticies.) This looks great for playing around with polyhedrae, latices, etc. There were three disadvantages: It was pretty expensive for what it was, there is only one length of edge, and there is insufficient room for 12 edges to come from one vertex, which rules out some latices. Sorry, I can't remember the name of the toy.

  • Yes for Sale ! (Score:5, Informative)

    by atollo-inventor ( 523072 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2001 @09:47PM (#2323252) Homepage
    Sorry the site is clogged, but none the less you can get kits at a few stores around the US, and soon at Discovery Channel Stores.

    Some basic info for those that couldn't make it to the site... yet.

    Yes there are initially only two pieces and the system is LEGO compatible.

    The pieces are currently made in Scotland ! Yes, amazingly other things do come out of Scotland other than single malt !

    One person nailed our intent on the head in an earlier message, we hope to introduce a new creative building system for all ages.
    You can build anything from dinosaurs to geometric space structures !

    Hope some of you manage to make it to the site,
    and thanks for the "constructive" feedback.
    • The pieces are currently made in Scotland ! Yes, amazingly other things do come out of Scotland other than single malt !

      Hey, don't forget about IRN-BRU [bevnet.com]!

      The toys are neat, but I fear for anything that doesn't have pointy bits that look like guns. What good is making a model star ship if I can't arm it to the teeth? Mass destruction, that's what sells toys.

      The minimalist approach is also really nifty in a geek sort of way, but is it going to be a marketing hit? Even Lego seems to have lost the "generic block" approach and has gone over to making very specific pieces. Presumably this is because they can sell 10 times the number of "Bionicle" kits if you need the unique parts to make each model.

      When is Atollo going to be available in my kids' Happy Meals? :-)


    • hey, Scotland is also where you get IRN BRU - the most virulent, awesome soft drink ever.
    • Hey, any freebees to the guy that brought atollo the attention it deserves??? ;-)
  • I've got boxes of Lego and Construx at home sitting in the basement. Haven't opened the boxes in years, but I still remember using Super Glue to allow perfectly stable cross overs. :)

  • Lego is all very well and good, but it doesn't beat Meccano [meccano.com]. You've gotta love something you can build a working orrery [dalefield.com] or a working vending machine [idx.com.au] out of.

  • Nope. (Score:2)

    by Dwonis ( 52652 )
    I'm sorry, but LEGO blocks are much more sturdy (especially with epoxy). These things are nice toys, but suck for prototyping anything.
    • I take that back. They would be somewhat useful for robotics, due to the large spaces between pieces. Still, I prefer LEGO.
  • If all you care about is shape, clay is a lot more creative. If you care about function, both Lego and Atollo seem pretty boring to me. Bring back ErectorSet or give FischerTechnik [fischertechnik.com] a try--that's a much nicer engineering construction set.
  • Inspired by their web site copy...

    Once the ball is in the socket
    There are many ways to rotate the brokit
    In these two examples the brokit is locked
    Safe in the neighbouring socket slot

    Rotating a brik by 90 degrees,
    Joining two brokits becomes a breeze.
    Join them up, socket to socket,
    This is the way to make columns of brokits.
    (Hinges will also fit back to back,
    To create a double socket stack)
  • It looks a LOT like 'Zoob' [kidscape.com], but with a better idea for a hinge/crosspiece, and with the lego compatability. My friends who run Waltham, MA's all-construction-toy The Construction Site [constructiontoys.com] haven't heard of it yet, but knowing them, they probably will have it in stock as soon as it's available to general retailers.
  • I've always loved this kind of thing, from Lincoln Logs to the old erector sets with the metal girders that you could slice your fingers open with.

    Another one in that market that most people don't know about is ZomeTools [zometool.com]. I've used these things to model molecules, build small pieces of furniture, explain 4d geometry, and decorate my party spaces with cool sculpture.

  • These would make a good desktop toy for the office. Just have a bowl with a couple hundred of these guys in it. Great ice-breaker too... like a geeks way of bonding.

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