One of the toys I played with quite a lot as a child was Spirograph. Being stuck in a hospital bed in a half-body cast limited the typed of toys I could play with, so I have fond memories of this one.
Paper, pens, and an assortment of gears and other shapes with a guide called a stator pinned to the page. You then spin the gears in the stator using an assortment of pens as an axle for the gears. This created a multitude of shapes on the paper. Simple but fun for a kid. I liked it anyway.
So check out this jumbo sized Drawing Machine that works on similar principles. Pretty cool:
The damn web 2.0 embedding feature won’t load on my crappy Internet, so click here