Gifts to spark curiosity
A 2017 gift guide
So much awesome
In my work teaching creative technology, I try out an enormous number of new books, games, kits and apps. Parents and schools are constantly scrambling to figure out what’s worth their attention, but it’s hard to keep up!
For every gem like SET (see below), there’s a dozen duds like Giggle Wiggle (don’t ask).
Below are my recommendations for gifts to spark curiosity, discovery, strategic thinking, and wonder in children.
Board games
Board games (and card games) are not just a pastime — educators and psychologists universally agree that play is a crucial form of learning for children.
In addition to learning to strategize, board games require children to communicate precisely, to mentally model the thinking of their opponents, to negotiate, and to practice navigating personal relationships.
Focus, little one
Animal Upon Animal, around $25 (age 3+)
A simple, well-made stacking game with satisfying, solid wooden animals. The beauty of this game is that kids naturally realize they need to focus and control their bodies in order to keep the stack from tumbling.
To keep the games even, I recommend handicapping older players and adults by giving them extra animals at the start.
The gateway game
Love Letter (and Adventure Time Love Letter), around $12 (age 5+)
Just about the simplest that a modern board or card game can get. It’s totally playable with no strategy at all, so it scales to all ages. But if you want a bit of strategy, there’s enough for adults to play — it was even played on Will Wheaton’s board game demo show Tabletop.
It should be mentioned that the art is pretty strongly gendered, in an old fashioned way. As an alternative to the inert princess in a girdle, there are several editions of the game that play the same exact way but switch up the art. I love the visually appealing Adventure Time version, which requires no familiarity with the cartoon. There’s also a Batman version, though it goes in and out of print.
The last family I gave this to (with a first grader) just told me, six weeks later, that they’ve already played it countless times.
The easy sell
Sushi Go! The Pick and Pass Card Game, around $15 (ages 6+)
Sushi Go! is the easiest game to convince people to play that I’ve ever encountered.
Part of the attraction is its simplicity. On your turn, you pick one card — everyone plays at once — and everyone passes their remaining hands to the player to their left.
Some cards, like the fish-on-rice sushi pieces, score points on their own. (Just like individual pieces of sushi!) Others, like sashimi, come in sets and need to be joined by their friends before they’ll score.
So there’s a push-your-luck dynamic: do you score a few points safely, or take a risk for a bigger score? And a bit of offense: do you hold back the last sashimi that another player needs?
Cute, fun, and just a small step up from Love Letter, it practically jumps off our shelf.
A favorite of all ages
SET: The Family Game of Visual Perception, around $13 (Ages 7 and way up)
SET is a symbol matching game. Its rules can be explained quickly, and everyone plays at once, examining the cards to find sets of three that follow a particular pattern.
I know, it kinda sounds like homework. But that description doesn’t do justice to how utterly hypnotic it can be to play SET. Not mindlessly hypnotic, like a zombie — it’s more like meditating.
But the icing on the cake is that SET can be played with any number of players, from one to a dozen. That makes it the perfect game to pull out while in a group, such as at holidays or on vacation: both veterans and curious newbies won’t be able to resist coming over and joining in.
It’s a great gift for adults, too. It’s not specifically a kids’ game, it’s just simple enough for kids.
Ready for something deeper
7 Wonders, designed by Antoine Bauza, around $40 (ages 8 and way up)
In 7 Wonders, players build a city of the ancient Mediterranean, card by card: a palace, a senate, a marketplace, a barracks, a library. They also build that city’s “wonder of the world: the hanging gardens of Babylon, the colossus of Rhodes, the great pyramid of Giza.
Every card has costs, and tradeoffs. Focus too much on scientific research, say, and opponents might overpower your military. Spend too long building up your workshops and mines and you won’t have time left to use the materials they produce.
7 Wonders plays fast and scales up to 7 players without taking a long time. The components are utterly gorgeous, and the gameplay is simple. And yet, there is tons of strategy here, if you want to get into it.
Two notes: first, the game seemed hopelessly complex when I first read the rules. But once I played through a practice game on my own, I saw how simple it really is.
Second, it’s really meant for 3 players or more. But you can easily play with 2, by just dealing in an imaginary 3rd player.
Books
Several of the books I’m recommending here are comics, which are seeing an extended creative explosion.
(If you’re not convinced that comics are real literature, I highly recommend Scott McCloud’s extraordinary book Understanding Comics, which is erudite, wide-ranging, and fun.)
An imaginative bedtime
The Way Home in the Night by Akiko Miyakoshi, around $17 (age 2+, read by a parent)
Yes, this is just a book about putting a child (or rather, an anthropomorphic bunny) to sleep. But if you look closer, it’s a book entirely about what the child observes with her senses, and what she imagines happening next. It’s an elegant invitation to perception and imagination.
The scientific method, for kids
Mesmerized by Mara Rockliff and Iacopo Bruno, around $17 (age 5+ if read aloud; age 8+ if read by self)
It’s very hard to make an entertaining story out of the scientific method. Here, the flowery text and gaudy design tell what’s ultimately a simple story of careful scientific thinking. Just be aware that it’s a more challenging read than your typical picture book.
Riding the “coding for kids” wave
Secret Coders series by Gene Luen Yang & Mike Holmes, around $10 (age 6+ if read by a parent, 8+ if read by self)
Secret Coders is one of a crop of new books trying to work computer programming concepts into children’s literature. The books are quick reads, though the stories aren’t especially memorable.
But the story is beside the point.
The point is, my kids devoured the fist book, and they legitimately learned the the concepts it pushed. They actually learned binary numbers, enthusiastically. Both of them.
The books accomplish their fundamental goal of painlessly easing readers into computer concepts that they will encounter in the classroom one day, and making them feel like insiders in the world of programming.
Entrepreneurship for pre-teens
The Baby-Sitters Club Graphic Novel series by Ann M. Martin, adapted by Raina Telgemeier, around $11 (age 7+ if read aloud; 9+ if read by self)
Raina Telgemeier is a master graphic novelist, as you know if you’ve read any of her fantastic books Smile, Sisters, Drama, or Ghosts (see below). What you might not know is that she has been adapting the 1980s chapter book series The Baby-Sitters Club, and it’s a hundred times better than the original series. (Trust me, I read a good two dozen of them back in the day!)
In Telgemeier’s hands, each club member is a completely unique person, with different realms of savviness and insecurity, courage and curiosity. And through all that, they are intrepid entrepreneurs: negotiating crises, wrestling with the day-to-day politics that arise within their cooperative business, and taking ownership of their work.
One note — except for Claudia, who is Japanese, the group is entirely white. (Claudia and Mean Janine, the 4th book, is my favorite so far.) I wish they’d tweaked the source material on that front.
Magic realism for kids getting older
Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier, around $11 (age 7+ if read aloud; age 9+ if read by self)
Ghosts breaks from Telgemeier’s customary realism, but the focus is very much on the living, and on what an older sibling can learn from a younger one. Telgemeier’s visual use of the California coast is breathtaking, and so is Katrina’s struggle to let her creativity speak, even in the face of deep fear about her sister’s chronic illness.
You should know that death is a central topic of the book, handled with grace. Also, in a welcome counterpoint to the Babysitters’ Club, the family is Latino.
Speculative fiction for pre-teens
Singularity by William Sleator, around $8 (age 8+ if read aloud; age 10+ if read by self)
There aren’t many great pre-teen novels in the sci-fi genre — er, I mean speculative fiction — but several of the best ones are by Sleator.
Don’t be scared off by the misleading Aliens-type image on the cover; this very human book is about twin teenage brothers who need each others’ help to face the unknown, but who can’t stop struggling over status and power. (There are brief mentions of puberty, and frequent mentions of masculine insecurity.) There are no spaceships or lasers, but there is a cosmic mystery whose unexpected consequences will leave them changed forever.
I’ve pondered this book’s thought-provoking central concept since I read it in 3rd grade. To my delight, my 3rd grader daughter loved it just as much when we read it together this year.
Wild cards
Here are a few gifts you might not have considered, and my pitches for them.
My first power tool
CCbetter Mini Hot Melt Glue Gun, around $13 (age 8+, supervised by an adult)
If you’ve never considered getting a child a tool that requires careful attention to safety, I don’t blame you. It took some convincing, and a long tutorial on safety habits, for me to entrust my daughters to this one. But I think it’s been absolutely worth it.
A glue gun is much stronger than Elmer’s, and much less frustrating than Crazy Glue. But while it’s great at sticking things together quickly, what it really is is an incredible creative tool.
Put down a piece of waxpaper and you can actually doodle, using hot glue as your ink. The result can be colored or painted when it dries, which is nearly instantly. It’s sort of a 2D/3D sculpture creator — a unique, versatile, and easy to use tool of general creativity.
Now, the metal tip and melted glue certainly get hot, and my daughters have burned themselves (very mildly) a few times. I’m not saying there isn’t risk; your mileage may vary, and you should always supervise children’s use of anything that plugs in or could hurt anyone by accident. But I personally believe it’s teaching them real responsibility, at a reasonable level.
I’ve got two of this specific glue gun, and while it’s nothing fancy, it does the job and doesn’t break easily.
A surprisingly affordable laptop
ASUS C201 11.6 Inch Chromebook, around $220
Today’s children are the touchscreen generation: more young people are using computers than ever before, and yet few are proficient with a keyboard and mouse — let alone concepts like copying/pasting and keyboard shortcuts.
If you haven’t considered getting your child a laptop, consider it. A laptop is less of a dedicated entertainment device than a tablet or phone; there are fewer notifications, and interfaces are generally less snazzy. And it builds computer literacy much more than a tablet or phone does.
Plus, they have become inexpensive. This ASUS Chromebook is $220 (and often available for less on Amazon), and that’s not a teaser price or a trick — they’ve been making them for years, and I’ve bought many of them for my classes.
It’s important to be clear about what you are, and aren’t getting, when you get an inexpensive computer. It’ll feel slow at times. “Chromebooks” are so-called because they basically run one program: the Chrome web browser. You’re not going to run Adobe Photoshop on this thing. But these days, so much can be done through app-like websites such as Google Drive that “desktop” apps are much less important than they used to be.
A few important exceptions: full games like Minecraft won’t run on a Chromebook, and it’s tricky to print from a Chromebook. If you want printing to be easy, or your child loves particular desktop programs, then you’ll need a Windows, Mac or Linux laptop. The Acer Aspire E is the most popular budget laptop there is, at around $350, but heads up: it’s the only item on this list I haven’t tried.
A gift it’s always the right time for
Journal/personal notebook, around $10 (age 2–102)
A journal, needless to say, can be the greatest and most horizon-expanding book in the world.
One tip for giving a journal is to gently prompt the recipient with something specific to write in it, to get their pen flowing. “I used to make lists of my favorite songs. Have you ever written down your list?” Or, “The first thing my brother did when he got a journal was to write down a new alter ego in it .”
A few designs I like are this traveler’s leather style, (above left, in light blue and other colors) and this floral, elastic design (above right).
There are many more on Amazon, and in a bajillion local stationary shops and bookstores.
And journals go great with a few good pens — nothing fancy, just easy-rolling and comfortable.
I’d love to know what you give, what you recommend, and what you find expands children’s worlds! You can reach me at wheeler.benjamin@gmail.com .
Ben Wheeler is a software developer and teacher in Brooklyn and the founder of Ada & Leo, a kids’ creative tech program.
