Hape Junior Inventor Experiment Starter Kit | 42 Piece Construction Building Toys, STEAM Science Kit For Kids 4 Years And Up

The product itself is well made & it nicely packs up to be carried elsewhere.I find it incredibly expensive for it's limited use. I think it only allows for 12 very simple contraptions to be built.Where it is beneficial is in providing ideas to implement a simple system, so if you struggle with constructing a few rods and 2 gears to have a hand move back & forth, your family may find this beneficial.For a similar outcome of function, I would rather purchase a Klutz Lego book or something like this.

This was a Christmas gift to my 5yr old daughter who loves to build things. It was a big hit with her! She was able to look at the pictures to figure out how to build a couple of things. The pieces are big enough where it's not difficult to hold them and they are plastic so no metal parts. It seems pretty durable too because she can be rough on her toys. A great gift!

My son loved building and creating different things. He is 3 and only needed a little help.

This workbench was a birthday gift for my 4 year old granddaughter. She loves it and plays with it all the time. I assembled it before I gave it to her and was empresses by the ease of assembly and the quality of the materials used for the workbench. It is sturdy and a good size for a child. All the tools and parts are also sturdy and well made. The instructions are colorful and give many ideas for building moving projects. The variety of parts is impressive and makes it possible to create a large number of different projects. The only thing I would have liked is to have the battery included, for the cost of the workbench that would have been very nice.

There is a tiny instruction booklet, but it's not sufficient to be able to follow and make anything work. I have a PhD in biology. Normally I can figure out how to make things work without a manual, but not this time. Sure I can make a structure that looks just like the vague picture (most people would have trouble getting this far with the minimal instructions), but I still couldn't make it work right to do the experiment, because the picture is inaccurate. I found a series of youtube videos that appear to be put out by hape that show how to do it and in every experiment that I couldn't make work, there was some critical thing that was different between the one picture given with the set and how it actually looks when it's working (i.e. the picture shows to use the magnifying glass, when the youtube video shows to use the kaleidoscope or the picture shows to put things at a very specific set distance, when the youtube shows to slide back and forth until it comes into focus).On the other hand, my 4 year old is really enjoying the plastic screw driver, plastic bolts, plastic nuts, and the pieces of wood to put them in.Did I mention that this toy is almost entirely made of cheap plastic? And there are apparently 8 different experiments to set up, but you cannot set up more than 1 at a time, even if they don't have any main parts in common, because there are only enough plastic screws and nuts to put together 1 at a time. If even one of these cheap plastic screws breaks, then this toy will be useless. Would it really kill them to add a few extra cheap plastic pieces?