Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought these for my Kindergarten class and, despite reading the product description, was a little surprised at the simplicity of these at first. I initially purchased them because I have a class full of super creative 5 and 6 year olds who are obsessed with building and love any kind of "think outside the box" type of challenge. I greatly prefer to invest in open-ended materials that encourage exploration and creativity instead of more limiting toys that are forgotten once they've "finished". Still, I wasn't sure it would hold the kids' attention enough to be a favorite. I introduced them pretty simply by explaining the premise and telling them that they could try some of the challenges on the cards or make their own creations. I should have known not to underestimate my little guys and girls because they really do love these. They allow for creative thinking and planning, provide varying levels of difficulty, are challenging enough to hold interest without being impossible, and encourage children to keep trying even if it doesn't work the first time - something that can be really difficult for my students' age group. Some prefer to just build and balance with them, while others are absolutely determined to complete all of the cards. I have one future engineer who asked for my help with one of the expert cards and was so excited that we managed to do it, he politely asked for no help on the next one and very carefully did a different one on his own (pretty tough, required several attempts, but doable). When he finally did it, he said "This card says expert so I'm an expert now, right?". Would definitely look into buying more of these sets in the future.