Review on Exploration Educational Snap Circuits Electronics by Corey Burgess

Bought two of these to play electronics at the weekend. I bought them both new and they were sealed by the manufacturer but when I opened them I found that one box had all the parts disassembled (although all the parts were there) and the other was neatly boxed but everything was missing details. 3 snap-on wires indispensable for every project. It looks like it's easy (and free) to request a replacement on the site. However, I am very upset that I bought two sets and both had packaging issues. The kids didn't care about the loose details, they were willing to share and had fun building the patterns. My daughter is 9 and her friend is 11. Seems like a good toy for kids that age. My daughter needed some supervision and help, although with a little experience she probably won't need it anymore. There's a lot to read and they were happy to start and upset with my reading so I skipped most of it and just jumped to charting. The details make the circuit really easy to put together and the clear diagrams/instructions were excellent. This kit starts with a few simple circuits that light up LED lights that are instantly easy to implement, and then increases dramatically in complexity over 100 projects. We did about a dozen of these, and the kids were keen to deviate from the script and experiment. The spinning propeller blades were especially fun (my daughter called them drones). They were given about an hour and a half to play with the circuits before moving on to other toys. The next evening I circled with my daughter again including the sound parts to play music from a cell phone (tablet in our case) and we played with our kits for over an hour and she was still interested in it when I called it an issue on time to sleep. Overall I think it was a lot of fun and I appreciate the educational aspects of this toy. I think we should have started with the basic kit because I think this kit is meant to build on the knowledge and skills you gained in the previous kits and it doesn't look like this kit will cover basic electrical / explain electronic concepts. It's hard to judge properly as we haven't read everything. I expect we'll continue to have lots of fun with this as there are still loads of projects to do and my daughter seems happy to be repeating what she already knows. I would also like to note that I was impressed with the fiber optic communications demonstrated by this kit using diodes, fiber optic cable and a phototransistor. I intend to buy more Snap Circuits products although I am concerned about packaging issues with the manufacturer as it seems I have already reached the life limit of 3 free "spare" parts per customer with the very first kit missing 3 parts. This will likely be less of an issue as we get more sets and get some redundancy.