Solar Robot Toys for Kids Ages 8-12, 12-in-1 STEM Projects Science Kits for 8-13 9 10 11 Year Old Teen Boys Girls, 190Pcs DIY Building Experiment ...

The listing for this kit says it's good for kids 8 & up. Good luck getting an eight-year-old paying attention long enough to build these robots. There are many, many pieces in this kit and each must be cut out from an injection-molded frame. Then, all the pieces need to be "quarantined" into their own little bags so you can keep straight which piece is E10 and which is C6. The bags are included, as are labels for the bags. That's a nice bit of foresight from the designers. I would HIGHLY recommend you do the quarantining. Else, you'll end up scratching your head bald trying to find that next piece. The next step is building the body and head of the various robots. These two parts are the core of all the bots. Now it's time to choose which of the 12 bots to build first. The instruction booklet lists them in order of complexity/difficulty. Even though I felt like, with my help, my grandson could jump straight to one of the more complicated bots, that attempt failed disastrously. We fell back and built the first bot and had success. Maybe sticking with simpler bots first is a really good idea...maybe we're just dumb. You'll want to also pay VERY close attention to the build instructions. I was glad to see that it wasn't one of those bad-Chinese-translation booklets. Still, it's short on words and big on pictures, making it easy to get a piece backwards, or to mistake piece E5 with piece E14. If your intended recipient of this kit is easily distracted, they're going to be challenged. That said, maybe this is a good tool for instilling some stick-to-it-iveness. It's more complicated than LEGO (not including the Technics) so if your kid is into more than just clicking bricks together, this might just be a fun adventure. All in all, I like the kit and hope to use its wide variety of bots to encourage my grandson to pay less attention to video games and more on STEM. It's a great kit for that.

These are so much fun to build and then run. Hours of entertainment.

The instructions appear promising at first glance but fall short in practical application, which is disappointing. Assembling the gear necessitates extra hands due to the complexity of aligning all parts simultaneously. Although the axles feature multiple points for placing washers to secure the gears properly, the manual fails to specify the correct placement, leading to confusion. It becomes evident that some components are designed to function in a certain way, yet their fit is not precise enough to fulfill their purpose effectively. Refer to the manual, specifically page 37, section 7, for further insight. The challenge of installing five shafts simultaneously with just two hands before sealing the section is baffling. This toy, regrettably, does not meet expectations and is not recommended for purchase. Moreover, it requires the consumer to complete the manufacturing step of detaching the pieces from the mold, adding to the overall frustration.

I like the potential for creativity.

GREAT FOR HRS OF FUN