Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My in-laws got this kit for my son for his 7th birthday. He loves robots, and was super excited about it, which means he bugged me everyday after his birthday to help him put it together. I have included several photos to give you an idea of what exactly is involved in one of the projects. He chose the DogBot for his 1st build. The manufacturer suggests this is for ages 8 and up. I know everyone wants their kids to be little scientists, but chances are your kid isn't going to be able to follow the directions for this on their own unless they are above 10 years old and mechanically inclined, or have decent experience with model assembly. INSTRUCTIONS and ASSEMBLY: The instructions are fairly clear blow-aparts. The first thing I would do is an ops check on the solar panel and motor (you don't want to spend time assembling the whole project and find out you have something faulty at the end). I would suggest a decent pair of kitchen shears to help snap out some of the pieces and an Exacto knife or straight razor to shave off the little pieces that tend to snap off with the pieces needed for assembly. It's very much like building a snap together model if you have any experience in that arena. I set the instructions up on an art easel so my kid could see them and follow along. DO NOT just snap out all the pieces and try to assemble this project. I called out the piece numbers to my kid as they came up in each step and he snapped them out. I directed him to follow the instructions and when he had a tough time, I set it up like it was in the blow-apart and had him snap it together, and he still had a tough time with some of the assembly. You need to basically assemble everything, including gear boxes, which some will find difficult. QUALITY: This is a science project not a toy. The pieces are extremely light plastic, and the motor is tiny. I could see this breaking easily under normal play conditions, so I would advise against allowing your kids to "play" with it unsupervised. The decal stickers don't stick as well as I would like them to, but I can fix that. All in all it's a decent kit. I think my in-laws got it from Walmart, so I doubt they paid $40 for it like it's priced here. I personally would not buy this for more than $20, but that just me. As you can see in the picture my kid was happy with the end result. It also kept his attention through the entire build process which took about an hour, maybe an hour and a half because I tried to get him to do as much as possible.