As a kid we used to sled on a wooden Flexible Flyer. As a college student we used sled on food trays we, um, “creative acquired” from the school cafeteria. That’s what sledding was like back then. This is sledding today:

The Hammerhead Sled.

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Spot Cool Stuff laments the general direction children’s toys have taken away from requiring imagination. Surely, part of the issue has been the proliferation of online gaming websites aimed at kids.

But if websites have been part of the problem maybe they can be part of the solution? That’s the idea behind the Israel-based start-up Shidonni.

Shidonni has a variety of fun, imagination-enhansing online games for children. Kids can draw animals, for example, upload the drawing to the Shindonni site, and then have their animal creation roam around the virtual Shindonni world for others users to see.

And here’s our favorite part: On Shidonni you can take a child’s drawing of an imaginary creature and then turn it into a real life stuffed animal!

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Spot Cool Stuff admits to being a LEGO purist. We like the basic plastic interlocking LEGO bricks that haven’t changed much since 1958, the ones that can be built into virtually any construction that can be imagined. We generally aren’t as big fans of many of the LEGO model sets (the trains series being a big exception) because their pieces can really only be used to build a specific shape, or specific plane or specific whatever. So it was with some surprise to us how great we found the LEGO’s newest series: LEGO Architecture.

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