Intelligent Electronics Track

Thirty years ago, I bought an allegedly-simple Snap Circuits electronics kit for my 8 year old son. It was a bit beyond him at the time, but good enough that he kept it around and recently passed it on to his own 8 year old son, who similarly kind of likes it, but still finds it complex.

Wondering how things have changed in thirty years, I was eager to try this new set on my 8 year old grandson, and today was the day. As hoped, he was indeed interested, and happy to explore the kit. I'd expected him to first read the manual, but rather he just dived in, trying to build one of the middle projects (a light detector that makes a speaker crow like a rooster when exposed to light.) Once I pointed out there were step-by-step instructions to follow on the left side of the page, he was up and at it, with almost no additional help needed. Within a few minutes, he had it doing something, but had one wire connected one position off initially. Once we rechecked his work, all was well, with crowing every time we flipped on the lights in that room.

This is the grandson who never ranks anything above a 3 out of 5, but he gave this kit a 4.5. From anyone else, that's a solid perfect 5 stars.

One aspect of this kit is both a strength and a weakness: The kit consists mostly of ten "black box" preassembled electronic modules that merely need to be placed on modular boards and wired together with pre-terminated color-coded wires of various lengths.

Received this as part of the Amazon STEM subscription for 8-13 year olds.
My 7 year old son is picky. This, he loves; therefore, I love.
He spent almost 3 hours just today working on the first 17 builds. The set has a total of 50 builds in the instructions. I'm not a fan exactly of the instructions format, but we figured it out, and he rolled on by himself after the 2nd build.
This is definitely worth the money, in my opinion.

This is a great way to learn about circuits. It has real wires too hook up to real components such as push buttons, LED lights, speaker, microprocessor and more (not like the cheap circuit sets). My only complaint, which is minuscule, is that the wires can be difficult to push in sometimes and the wire ends bend easily. That could be frustrating for younger kids.
We received it as part of the Amazon STEM club. We currently use this set in our homeschool for science.. My son loves it.

My boys (ages 9, 7, & 6) love this set!! They got it for Christmas and have built every single thing in it. Thier favorite project was building a doorbell for thier bedroom door. So cool! They are great at building Lego sets, so they were able to follow the manual and make all the various items without help. They love creating things and I love that they are using thier brains and hands to make something of thier very own. Total win!

Ok, so we are giving this 5 stars even though we had an issue with the microprocessor holes lining up so we could get the wires in. When we got to the project that made a tone we couldn't get the tone to go. I looked very closely and could see that the wires were missing the socket in holes A and B. I took the screws out and put it back together and they lined up better.

That said, my 11 year old daughter wasn't sure what this kit was all about but she quickly tore into it. She built project by project and had a blast. She played with it over 2 hours solid the first night and showed me each project. She learned about the components and really enjoyed it. Everything was easy enough for her to do without any assistance from me.

The next morning she started right back up playing with it. She made the race game and we had a good time trying to time pressing our buttons just as the number 1 light turned on. I had a 101 project kit like this from Radio shack when I was a kid. This brought back great memories. It was really nice to see her having fun and learning about electronics.

This is an excellent gift for any kid. I can't recommend it highly enough.