Last week the esteemed Science Museum held its annual awards for brilliance and announced that the best toy of the year is a £29.99 electronic and magnetic building kit that lets children choose from a range of 40 experiments.

Called Electro Mag, it can be used to construct anything from a simple light switch right up to a complex lie detector. I daresay it might even be possible for your son to attach electrodes to his sister’s ear lobes. And give her a whole new hairstyle.

The judges said the toy was easy to use, good fun and educational. And that’s lovely. Very Just William. Exactly what these ragamuffins need to stop them scrumping apples.

Anyway. Guess what. Immediately after the announcement was made, half the nation’s youngsters rushed to the nearest toy store where they spent roughly twice as much on a video game called Halo 3, in which a tough young space captain called something like Clint Thrust rushes about the universe kicking aliens in the throat.

I would dearly love, at this point, to launch into a tirade against stupid video games, and how their graphic violence is poisoning the minds of our precious children.

But I love them. I spend hours chasing my kids around nuclear power stations, laughing hysterically when their arms and legs are blown off by imaginary hand grenades.

Of course, it would be nice if we sat round the fire playing Monopoly but, for two reasons, this is never going to happen. First, it’s not 1956 any more, and second, why would my kids want to spend the afternoon (and most of the rest of their lives for that matter) pushing a top hat round London when they could use the time to put a sniper’s round in their dad’s left ear?

Of course, older people say that Monopoly brings families together. True enough. But so does Nightfire and Gran Turismo and Die Alien Scum. And it’s not like Monopoly is all about peace and love is it?

The only problem with electronic games, so far as I can see, is that while they are huge fun, kids don’t really learn anything. Other than how to drive very fast through a crowd of Cylons while firing a 50 calibre machinegun.

And that brings me back to the Science Museum.

They actually offer branded toys and in principle this is great. Now that Blue Peter can no longer break out the sticky-backed plastic, because it is too busy apologising for whatever it did the week before, it’s great that the guardian of all things scientific should be offering a range of cut out’n’keep products that educate, inform and entertain.

So great in fact that I actually own two. The first is something billed as a virtually indestructible model aeroplane. And I can testify to that. But the reason it’s virtually indestructible is that it won’t take off.

Making it is easy. You just clip the wings on, fix the wheels, look in the kitchen drawer for some batteries, find they’re all the wrong size, shout at your wife a bit, drive to the petrol station, come home . . . and you’re off.

“Come outside and watch this,” you yell excitedly to your family, who dutifully trudge into the garden thinking you’ve become Uncle Quentin from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five.

And then realise you haven’t as the model plane crashes immediately into a flowerbed. It was undamaged. But the same could not be said of the lupins it hit.

So I put it away and took out my other Science Museum toy. This one is a giant 25ft-long binliner and the idea is simple. You run around the garden scooping air into the open end and then you tie a knot. Then you run round the garden again, because while you were tying the knot all the air escaped.

You repeat this procedure until you’ve had a coronary and then you shout: “Wow, children. You won’t believe this.”

What you’ve made is a rudimentary hot-air balloon. The air trapped inside will warm up and your giant craft will take off. There are even warnings on the box about this. It’s not a toy. It’s not to be flown by anyone under the age of 14. And it’s certainly not to be flown near power cables.

There’s even a dramatic picture on the packaging showing some poor urchin being lifted clean off the ground and I knew my children would love that. Watching their dad being taken away by a bin bag full of global warming.

What actually happened is that the giant bag wobbled about in the gentle breeze until it lightly grazed a tree. And then it was punctured. And then it was useless.

This makes me nervous about all the Science Museum toys that you can buy. The hydrogen-powered car, the Mini Water Vortex, the fingerprint kit and, most of all, their toy of the year: the Electro Mag. Are they honestly suggesting it can be a lie detector? Really? Because for £29.99 I bet it isn’t very good.

This means that little Johnny is going to spend an entire weekend building what he thinks is an FBI polygraph. Which then says Dad is telling the truth when asked if he ever looks at pornography on the internet. Johnny’s going to be upset by that.

And he’ll be doubly upset when he’s broken some lupins with his model aeroplane and ruined his hot-air balloon in a tree. He might well decide that science is just a load of useless rubbish. And spend the rest of his life running over prostitutes instead.

That would be a pity.

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