Your child grips the soft, squishy edges of another learning toy, before abandoning it without a care in the world. How many toys have your bought them? How many crates of ‘toy garbage’ sits in the corner of their little rooms? To appeal to children, toys need to have intrinsic value - that special magic that separates it from the teeming masses. Thanks to electronic entertainment, we now have original and interesting concepts that are comparable to science fiction fantasies of only ten years ago. All it took was a team of geniuses to dream up products such as the Nintendo Wii, the junior laptop and other interactive toy gems. Come journey with us as we take a look at some of the most amazing and advanced children’s toys of today.

• Learning, with a gamepad in hand.

Welcome to one of the greatest concepts in history. From the original Nintendo, the Wii evolved out of the need to enable anyone (absolutely anyone) to play. It has been proven long ago that children who lack the essential hand-eye coordination required for sports, writing, design and countless other practices, can learn this skill through video gaming. The pastime of gaming has long suffered from various negative connotations and it is thanks to the ingenuity of the Nintendo design team that this stigma can finally be cast aside. The Nintendo Wii is a family-friendly console with a clean, modern look and remote controls, which have been designed to mimic the natural rhythm of our bodies. One control operates direction and the other is used for spatial control.

For instance, if your purpose in the game is to walk forward and turn around, you would use the direction control to move forward, and revolve the spatial control to turn around. Many games, such as Brain Age and Wii Fit make excellent use of these unique controls, by giving the user options related to specific movements, such as cutting a log by making a sawing motion, or skipping rope by hopping up and down. This correlation between onscreen action and the off-screen physical presence is a startling concept which has helped to develop the hand-eye coordination of many children (and adults). With a toy this exciting, many will continue to learn from the Wii for years to come.

If the Wii is too complex a learning toy for your children, then perhaps the natural simplicity of the V.Smile TV Learning system will be more to their liking. Many people consider this children’s toy to be the junior or ‘cartoon’ version of the Xbox or the Playstation. It has massive, oversized buttons that caters to both left and right-handed children, a wide library of colourful games featuring every child’s favourite characters and a host of fun features to educate and entertain. This colourful little device runs on batteries as well, so it can be used anytime, anywhere. There is even an included stylus, for the writing and mathematical activities that the V.Smile so happily accommodates. This makes for some exciting moments!

It is easy to see how children’s toys can now be confused with videogame consoles. In the race to develop new and exciting toys to capture our children’s imagination, the two have combined. Thanks to learning toys and videogame, the world of interactive children’s toys is truly a happy place to be.