CONSTRUCT & CREATE14 in 1 Solar Robot Kit

5 stars are based on the current price of £15.I bought this for my 4 year old 2 years ago. At the time it required me to build the kit, assigning little helping tasks along the way.My son is 6 now. We are on our fourth design and at each effort he is taking on more aspects of the build - this is certainly a science project kit, not a build toy.Is surprisingly powerful in the current sunshine so an excellent spokesbot for solar energy.Requires organisation! As soon as any parts go missing you will likely be in trouble.As the parts are tiny, the snap plastic niblets can get in the way of some of the models, but for this price this is a great value purchase.

Really nice educational robot.Easy to assemble, a young kid will definitely need the help of an adult but the kit is well organized and if you follow the instructions it works very well.The only downside is that you have to wait for enough light to feed the solar cells. So in winter it's difficult to play with it and this can be disappointing for demanding kids. You can still test it with artificial light though, until the sun comes up.But well, that's all the purpose of it.

The media could not be loaded. I'm really impressed with this kit, I wanted to buy something that would teach the basics of mechanics and electrical circuits and this was perfect.The instructions initially step the kids through putting all the parts into bags with labels so that the kids learn how to keep things organised but very quickly getting into building and testing the main component which sits at the centre of all the different things you can build.There is no way my 9 year old would have built this alone, and adult guidance will be needed in most steps, but it is a great was of spending time with the kids and helping them learn.Be warned however that the instructions say you only needs pliers/cutter to remove the parts from the sheets but I found that you need to invest time cutting out any extra plastic bits from the parts which had held them in pace on the sheets so that they make clean connections during builds. This preparation takes about an hour but a good investment to make sure it works.Also the solar panel on the robots head isn't great but you can get around that by using a AAA battery which puts the robot on turbo!Lastly my kit was missing 1 part, it was a very thin rod which helps connect one of the gears to the central box, I managed to work around it using by snapping a thin drill bit into the right length, lucky I had something to get me by.Because of the extra cleaning of parts, solar panel and missing part I knocked a star off, but overall I'm impressed, especially for the very low price.

My 7 year old daughter and I had great fun building this. Some of the pieces were tricky to push into place for her, but fine for me. She did most of the work and could follow the instructions fine with me helping a little. We made it on a dreary day and so used a bright lamp to make it work and it was so exciting to see the little 'bot' move. A real hit. Yes you do need the lamp close to the solar panel, but we thought that was fine. Can't wait to make the other models.Top tip - it takes a while to snip the pieces out of the packaging and put them into their little named bags (a must) so do this in advance of when you want to actually build the model or it could be disappointing.

I'm giving 3 stars as (having read the other reviews before I bought it), I already knew the solar panel didn't work- I would have been sorely disappointed had I not bought it in this knowledge. We have a number of strong halogen lights at home and none of them worked.My 7 year old and I built it together. The base unit wasn't too hard to get working (with the connections attached to a battery), but the instructions aren't the most user friendly I have ever seen.Building one of the actual robots pictured was a bit of a nightmare though. Some of the smaller joining pieces just didn't hold things together. The cogs met well enough to make it run one minute, and then didn't the next. You think you have it fixed, and then it stops working again.For the price, I don't think it is a BAD buy- my 7 year old learnt lots building it, and loves the base unit (which is basically the head and the blue/white box on two wheels, which works fine, with a battery) as a little robot anyway.

My 9 year old son asked for this as he's science and robot daft. I was a bit unsure about it being so cheap and when it arrived I was expecting to end up binning it because the first thing I saw was sheets of "cut out" plastic pieces, a bit like an airfix kit. But my son has experimented and made a few of his own designs now and loves the solar panel. Of course you need quite bright sunshine to make that work so he ends up taping the cables to a battery (AA) quite often.So anyway, for the price it's definitely worth it for a child who has an interest in building robots (and a bit of patience)

A fantastic gift, great value for money

I bought this for myself as I am self isolating and felt like my mind was going and needed something to keep it occupied. It did its job and first robot kept me busy for an hour.This is like an airfix kit when you open the box. Just make sure that you follow the instructions and put all the pieces into little plastic bags with labels on. You will need something to cut the pieces from their frame. Once that is done, you then have to assemble the body that mounts the solar panel. this is a little fiddly as you have to get all the gears to mess. But once that is done, you can then start to work on your first robot.Once you have completed it you will find that you need strong direct sunlight to make it work. I tried using LED torches to make it would but no luck, also tried a UV light but again no luck.