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from the get-in-touch-with-your-feminine-side dept.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
In 1998, Slovenian toy company Mehano designed a line of children's electronic typewriter toys with the ability to write secret messages.
Eventually, the company licensed the typewriter to another company, (none other than Barbie herself), that had something altogether different in mind for the toys. Slathered in pink, it was soon headed to market to appeal "to girls."
[...] The four encryption modes — each featuring a simple alphabet substitution cipher (or 1-to-1 encoding) — were left out of Mattel's instruction manuals and advertisements. Mattel is Barbie's parent company. Even the latest model, produced in 2015, omitted this novel feature.
[...] It's an all-too-common marketing assumption that continues to plague the "pink aisle" of girls' toys. They often fail to encourage little girls to grow up to be engineers and scientists. A December report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology showed that boys were almost three times more likely to receive a STEM-themed toy for Christmas.
"STEM toys are by default for boys," says Meryl Alper, professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. "We have to add 'for girls.'" With over a decade of experience working in children's media at Northeastern, Sesame Workshop and Nick Jr., Alper emphasizes the importance of representation and diversity in characters and storylines. Playtime matters.
"Children use the objects in their world to think through ideas," she says. "If you have objects that signal to a kid that it's not for them, either explicit or implicit, you reduce that opportunity to learn through manipulation."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Sunday January 22 2017, @02:07AM
What an damning indictment of modern parenting, consumed by paranoia.
Go watch The Imitation Game. Go talk about anyone's childhood toys and books. Kids are making up codes in class, at home, for puzzle books, for toys and have been for centuries.
Why on earth would you think that the problem with your scenario is THE CODE USED and not WRITING LOVE LETTERS TO AN ADULT?
As such, the code - in and of itself - has no problem inherent to its usage.
Your post is literally the paranoid guy on the Internet from 10 years ago (Oh, but only BAD people need to encrypt their messages, what are you trying to hide) brought forward into parenthood.
Get a life.
The real problem is that kids aren't given these kinds of intellectual challenges any more. The sexism thing is part of this (girls play Barbie, boys create working models of an internal combustion engine), but it's part of the dumbing down of modern living.
I'm so incredibly disappointed when I look at the toys my daughter chooses to play with, and the TV shows she chooses to watch. Zero educational content. LEGO Friends - LEGO for girls! So they turn it into a TV cartoon which is the most cringe-inducing tripe I've ever seen in my life. And LEGO Friends, as compared to boys LEGO aimed at the same age group, includes precisely zip beyond putting pink and purple blocks together.
And it's worsening with apps and websites, because they all claim to be "educational" but I honestly fail to see the educational aspect in 99% of them (P.S. I work in schools - that includes quite a lot of the crap that the schools use too). Let's give everyone Minecraft, Microsoft say it's educational and people do lessons in it so it must be! Bollocks. The bit that COULD be interesting (redstone circuits) is basically never touched by kids. Hell, I've seen a teacher try to cram it into a Geography syllabus. Let's not even get into their use of "SimCity" apps, attempting to crowbar them into a curriculum as well.
Kids at 12 - when I was that age - were soldering together their own computers from components. They were blowing crap up in the kitchen sink (I still do this!) and playing with dry-ice and acids. They were learning Morse Code and signalling "codes" to their friends. They were building and using CB radios (child protection wasn't an issue, because nobody was stupid enough to think that giving your address to a stranger or meeting them was a bright idea).
And it was nowhere near being "just the geeks". The school bully was a CB-freak. Others learned to make stink bombs from recipes in old books.
Now, none of that is "necessary" as they have a smartphone that's several 10's of thousands times faster than those computers, that can talk across the world and encrypt their communications for them. They aren't allowed near anything deemed "mildly hazardous if mishandled", which includes communications media. And anything vaguely intellectual or interesting or about exploring stuff is the realm of "the geek", stereotyped beyond anything that was around when I was a kid.
Kids today are already losing the intellectual interest, and it's not being helped by all being told they are all so fabulous all the time for every little thing. I've worked in schools - state, private, primary and secondary - for the last 20 years and I've yet to see a kid that I think might be able to program when they're older, for instance.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 22 2017, @02:31AM
Hey, I didn't endorse what I said, but was actually reinforcing your point - that modern parents are more paranoid than ever.
That being said, I'm going to call bullshit on soldering their own computers and building CB radios. Maybe a handful of select rich-kids did, but not the real-world. Reminds me of that Slashdot comment where some guy bragged about building a database system in assembler when he was eleven. I one-upped him by saying my pregnant mom would straddle the chair in front of the computer-desk and I would reach out my own mom's cunt before I was born to hand-code an RTOS in machine-language.
The rest of your points are, eh, on-point -- especially that creativity and imagination are no longer factors in childrens' toys. We used to play with our toys, now, kids' toys play with them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Sunday January 22 2017, @01:14PM
Have to disagree with you EF.
At 10-12 years old I was constructing simple radios with components taken from old TVs found on dumps or wherever. My first circuits followed a similar line. At 14 I had managed to save enough from my Saturday job to buy a Heathkit 3 valve (tube) HF radio which I had to assemble myself. Don't underestimate what 'children' can do, or convince yourself that only the rich could afford such hobbies. My parents were typical working class and not at all wealthy or privileged.
Knowledge, most often gleaned from library books at no cost,was available to all who sought it. Almost every child I now see has their own phone. If they stop texting the person standing next to them and go search the web they will find more information than they could ever hope to absorb in a lifetime.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday January 22 2017, @02:18PM
Would you like his name and address? He was the school bully, and he was mad into CB. There was a huge array of MASSIVE antennae sticking out of his house. He had a bedroom full of kit and was on it every night after his trucker-dad got him into it, which they built from old truck kits that were ripped out and repaired by them and then converted, amplified, tuned, etc. to improve their usefulness.
And ZX Spectrums were sold in two models - one for rich-kids pre-assembled, one for poor-kids where you soldered it together yourselves and saved £50. Have you never heard of the ZX Spectrum? Hell, I soldered my one back together any number of times when it was destroyed (I blame Daley Thompson's Decathlon, personally, with it's "waggle joystick to run forward" play that always got out of hand and broke the expansion connector for the joystick interface).
So, I'm sorry, but rather than "call people out", maybe do some fact-searching.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Monday January 23 2017, @01:30PM
And this was pre-vacuum tubes. They had to carve their own stuff from hunks of rock using other hunks of rock!
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday January 23 2017, @06:05PM
You had hunks of rock? Luxury.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday January 22 2017, @02:32AM
Kids at 12 - when I was that age - were soldering together their own computers from components. They were blowing crap up in the kitchen sink (I still do this!) and playing with dry-ice and acids. They were learning Morse Code and signalling "codes" to their friends. They were building and using CB radios (child protection wasn't an issue, because nobody was stupid enough to think that giving your address to a stranger or meeting them was a bright idea).
Careful there -- most of those activities could get you branded a "potential terrorist" today. Along with losing these skills and opportunities, there's a culture of paranoia around the things that few kids (or people in general) do anymore.
We've gone past "anti-intellectual": that's merely devaluing of intelligence in society. Now we FEAR independent thought. And to me, that's even more profoundly disturbing. It's one thing to brand someone a "geek" or "nerd" or whatever and make fun or alienate, but it's another to discourage exploratory activities because they might be perceived as a "terrorist threat."
Or, well, sometimes other fears too -- like how all chemistry lab glassware is suspected as "drug paraphernalia" these days. In some states, you even need a permit to own it (e.g., Texas). I'm talking about basic stuff like an Erlenmeyer flask. I'd be in trouble there, since I actually use lab glassware in my kitchen, since it's more thermal shockproof and cheaper than a lot of (worse) glassware marketed for kitchen use. But we've moved beyond reason here.
So aside from the reasons you cite, we actively discourage independent thought and exploration unless it's "approved" ahead of time, which kind of defeats the ideas of "independence" and "exploration."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @03:30AM
Kids at 12 - when I was that age - were soldering together their own computers from components.
I was, but the vast majority of people weren't. I think you have a delusional view of the past; most people were never very intelligent or interested in educating themselves. What you saw was the exception to the rule, and of course, soldering is not very impressive to begin with, so it's nothing much.