Many of us use some of these toys at least once when you were a child. But there are those who still today draw inspiration to solve real problems ...
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Rubik's cube- Born as a scientific pastime, then became a toy, invented by Hungarian, the cube-puzzle also gave work to mathematicians to understand the different permutations that could take its 54 minifrices (4.3 x 1019)
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Sling - It is an ancient and yet current game. Even the famous digital game Angry Birds, in fact, uses the ballistic principles that allow a projectile to hit a target. A pleasure so tantalizing, that some fans have put on the Net the instructions necessary to build a real slingshot, equipped with an accelerometer and an elastic sensor, to be connected to the computer.
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Meccano-The modular structures proposed to children have been developed by engineers and architects. In the Thirties pieces of the Meccano were used to build analog computers used to solve differential equations. With Col Meccano in 2009 a bridge was erected on the Liverpool Pier Head (a 23 meters long structure).
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The cheerful surgeon- The principle of this old game (ie "operating" a fake patient to test how much the hand stays still) is used today in the tools with which real surgeons learn to perform the most complex operations.
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Hot Wheels-These circuits for cars are built according to rigorous physical principles, which allow the cars to "go around death". A principle that works in full scale: a real 20 meters high track was built at the X Games 2012 in Los Angeles. It worked!
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Lego Mindstorms Nxt- The most complex kit of Lego contains real components to build a small robot that you need to design the computer and then be able to realize (programmable bricks, electric motors, sensors, gears, a gyroscope, etc ...). For the development of this game, some Mit researchers have been involved in the study of new programming languages. It is also often used in universities for "practical" robotics lessons.
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Slinky spring - The spring that makes the stairs and seems to "walk alone" was born by mistake: it was made by a naval engineer Richard James who was trying to build stabilizers for navigation instruments. It is the same type of spring still used today to explain wave properties (and in particular inelastic reflection) to high school students.
