First off get a Make magazine subscription. It has a lot of wonderful projects for kids that will keep an adults attention as well. One of the best thing I got

First off get a Make magazine subscription. It has a lot of wonderful projects for kids that will keep an adults attention as well. One of the best thing I got was a Lego Mindstorm for my kids. That thing has received a lot of use. I am an off-road hobbyist so my boy and I do a lot of auto fabrication and electronics projects for that. He likes restoring vehicles so we work on that quite a bit. I just bought him a 68 Bronco that we are restoring (he is young, 4 so my wife thinks I am crazy, but he loves it so why not). You can work quite a bit of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering education into restoring a vehicle. Not that I suggest going out and buying a car for a 4 year old, but I have some heart problems and may not be around to do it with him later. They all (10, 4, 2, well the 1yr old baby does not) use the computer and they all work on the ipad. I taught my oldest girl (10) Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Illustrator and she is now learning Flash, I have tried to developer he interest in learning to code but as of yet it has been fruitless (with the exception of the mind-storm, which has a visual programming IDE). A friend of mine suggested that I try Alice to see if she would catch on to that, but as of yet I have not tried it. She is a good artist, does all the home movies (I have to make her remove the special effects some times. "Come on now the baby did not lift the car, take it out") and some times helps me out with some graphics. I am rambling, but basically my post can be summarized as kids are awesome and there are a million projects that one can find to do with them.