Science Toy Review

Recently I compiled a list of best selling toys for Atomic Elephant Science and Toy Co. The list was based on customer purchases and feedback for the first half of 2008. The list has 12 of their best selling toys and includes subjects such as ant farms, greenhouses, chemistry sets, perfume making, instant snow, dinosaur skeletons, science magic tricks and some basic construction toys. You can see their list of best selling toys here.

I can vouch for several of these toys as I’ve played with a lot of them over the last year or so. The kits in order of my preference were:

• Triassic Triops Deluxe - if you’ve never hatched and grown these prehistoric creatures, you’ll be amazed at how interesting they are.
• Ant Jungle by Wild Science - I love all the Wild Science kits (including their chemistry and construction kits) but I particularly love their ant and worm farms and their great Eco-Dome. The Eco-Dome would have made my Top 10 list but it is generally too expensive to have enough purchases and reviews to date.
• Blizzard in a Bucket - by Be Amazing! Toys. While playing with this can make a big mess, it’s pretty fun as well.
• GeoSafari Quiz Phone - by Educational Insights, this is a pretty clever little toy. It’s not really science related but it covers several areas of early learning from shapes, basic math, pattern matching and reading.
• Owl Pellet - I dissected a kit called “Owl Puke” a few months ago and was pretty amazed to discover what all this particular owl had eaten. In my case he had eaten a shrew. I did this one with my 5 year old son and we had a blast laying out the bones according to the chart to discover if we had a mouse, bird or shrew skeleton. Very interesting…
• Fly Trap Fiends Greenhouse - this kit by DuneCraft was pretty cool. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the old TV commercials advertising the Venus Fly Trap. Ours did pretty well (and is still doing fine) but I’ve yet to see it capture and eat a fly on its own. We have however, captured a couple of live flys and fed it to our plant. We call him Fester.
• Ant Farm Gel Colony - I’ve reviewed this kit previously in this blog but will quickly say again that I love these gel colony ant farms by Uncle Milton. Some people have had trouble getting their ants to tunnel through the substrate but the one time we did it, everything worked fine.

The rest of their kits on the list I haven’t played with directly but plan to soon. If I find them worthy of reviewing you’ll see my writeup about them here. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in seeing their Top 12 toys of 2008 (so far), check them out at their best selling toys list.