Chaos eventually erupted in the barnyard

Once upon a time, my kids had what was then considered a high-tech gizmo: one of those See ‘n Say toys, where you dial an image of a certain animal, such as a cow, pull a string, and out would come something along the lines of, “The cow says ‘moo.’” ?

Chaos eventually erupted in the barnyard after the toy developed a low-tech malfunction, resulting in chickens making “moo” sounds, cows making “baa” sounds ? and so forth.

We’ve come a long way since then, perhaps too long a way. Witness complaints by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood over claims that certain mobile apps can help babies learn.

As recently reported by ?The Associated Press, this is the same group that mobilized against those “Baby Einstein” videos a few years ago, leading to nationwide consumer refunds. According to the AP, the American Academy of Pediatrics has also weighed in, discouraging any “screen time” for kids under 2.

If this includes smartphones, that battle is already lost. Last winter, my youngest grandson, then 23 months old, could grab his mother’s phone, speed dial his other grandmother in Colorado, then carry on a somewhat disjointed conversation of sighs, grunts? and an occasional recognizable word. Meanwhile, his older brother, closing in on age 4, regards the home computer as just another fun device among his arsenal of toys.

None of this, of course, was available when my own kids were little. The best toys my son ever had were Legos, which he fashioned into every sort of object you could imagine, from trucks to fire stations to rocket ships. Alas, even good old Lego has now gone digital, allowing kids to design hundreds of virtual models without ever having to touch a real Lego.

As for my daughter, her favorite toy throughout her childhood was an old doll named “Baby,” tossed aside by an aunt who had no use for such creatures. I don’t know if our daughter took Baby on her honeymoon but it sure went with her when she moved out of the house.

Mr. Potato Head and an occasional Cootie — as in the game — were the only items I ever assembled as a kid, although my younger brother, who would go on to become a civil engineer, did have an Erector set.

Then, as now, it can be argued that the best toy a kid can have is not the toy but the cardboard box it came in. Never more has that been proven than with the case of Caine Monroy, who at age 9 started building an arcade out of discarded cardboard in his dad’s East L.A. used auto parts store.

As recently outlined in myriad national news reports, young Caine had few visitors to his arcade that summer of 2011 until a filmmaker by the name of Nirvan Mullick wandered in looking for a used door handle. Not long after, Mullick made a film about the arcade and also organized a flash mob of customers.

Naturally, the thing went viral, raising more than $225,000 in college scholarship money for Caine. More importantly, Caine’s arcade has jumpstarted a wave of cardboard creativity through the non-profit Imagination Foundation, which inspires kids around the world to “think outside the box.”

Last year kids from 41 countries participated in the foundation’s “cardboard challenge,” churning out everything from football tables to robots and claw machines.

“It doesn’t matter how old you are,” Caine recently told NBC News. “All you need is cardboard and your imagination.”

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Ouya Console Looks to Fill Gaming Market Niche

I’ve spent the past couple days trying out the Ouya console. While it is a legitimate gaming machine, it’s not a real threat to grab serious market share from any of the “Big Three” console makers.

At $99, the tiny box and downloadable games in the $20 range are priced low enough to attract casual and occasional gamers who dig playing time-wasters on their smartphones. And, because of the Ouya’s potential to emulate several other earlier-generation consoles, it’s also likely to appeal to nostalgic and retro-gamers.

Ouya was funded through a Kickstarter project. Reviews of an earlier, beta version weren’t flattering, so I was somewhat skeptical as I unpacked the console. The strip of red plastic film printed with the message “And so the revolution begins” atop the console did nothing to allay my journalistic skepticism.

There’s literally not much to Ouya, which was released on June 25. I’ve had coffee mugs bigger than the little round-edged cube, which features a single power-on button, but an array of ports on the back. The Ouya has an HDMI port that let me display at a full 1080 resolution on my home LED television, plus a LAN port, a power port and a USB port.

The Ouya started right up,

but required us to both establish a network connection and update the console’s Android-based firmware. That proved to be somewhat of a problem in my office. Our intranet firewall settings precluded our using a wired connection, so we quickly paired the console’s wireless controller to the Ouya and sought out one of several wireless networks we maintain. We connected to the first and began the system update, but the Ouya kept getting disconnected from wi-fi and cutting off the update. We then tried a second of the office wireless networks, with the same discouraging result.

At that point, we opted to tether the console to the wi-fi hotspot created by a colleague’s iPhone, and around a half-hour after getting started, we were updated and ready to go. It’s important to note that you’ll have to create an account for yourself on the Ouya, including providing your sign-in name, a password, an email and a credit card number. That raised some questions in my mind about the security of Ouya’s servers, ones that I will be posing in a telephone interview with CEO and founder Julie Uhrman on Tuesday.

I took the Ouya home and found it failed to stay connected to my wired LAN. I play Xbox Live just fine on that connection, so I don’t understand why the Ouya kept disconnecting and canceling game downloads or giving me error messages. That, by the way, is a common theme with the device, I’m finding. Often, after clicking on a button to start a game or perform another action, I’d get an error message on the screen. Clicking again would make the message disappear and the game open or the action continue. I noticed the machine worked fine when in constant use, but after I’d put down the controller for a minute or two, I’d tend to get the errors. Anyway, I was unable to tether the Ouya to my own iPhone’s hotspot, but it worked very well on my home wi-fi network.

The Ouya’s opening menu features several very clear and basic commands, like “play,” “manage” and “discover.” “Discover” takes you to the games menu, where you can find listings for around a couple hundred games in several easily navigable categories. All that I tried were free to download and play in a test or demo version, with a button to purchase the full game. The games, themselves, are a mixed bag, which I will get into later. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.happmart.com.