If you’ve read any of the others posts here or seen the videos, you know that my son is into projects especially those related to science. My son loved the Snap Circuits
While the box says it is good for kids older than 8, Brennan (5) was very quick to figure out how the pieces go together. They snap together like Legos so he was able to assemble, with the help of the pictures in the manual, just about every one of the configurations. He hasnt stopped playing with the toy since Christmas which is more than we can say for just about everything else, including the horrible Magnext toy. From a pure mechanics point of view, he loved building everything.
In addition to the fun of flat out building things, we were able to help Brennan learn about electricity through the toy too. The toy has a couple of different types of parts: an on/off switch, basic connectors, a space war siren, a light bulb, a motor, a fan (also called a UFO), and a couple of resistors. In total there were about 100 different projects to start with and Bren figured out several others, which I subsequently had to explain how they worked which was fun too. The projects teach basic circuitry and the projects are designed to get subsequently more intricate as your go through the booklet. The projects took him about 5-15 minutes each to figure out and he played with each one for perhaps an hour or so. His favorite project, by far, was the flying UFO project. Here is a picture of the instruction and his implementation of it:
As promised here is a quick video of it in action:
We paid around $27-30 at Radio Shack for this version and here are couple of Amazon affilitate links for some others that I am considering for gifts later in the year:
- Snap Circuits SC-300
- Snap Circuits Deluxe Snap Rover Kit
- Electronic Experiment Kit with Computer Inteface, Snap-Circuits
-Dana
