Customer Reviews

The Learning Journey Techno Gears Marble Mania Genius Construction Set

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have to admit I was hesitant to buy this item after reading the negative reviews. However, my family found that the negative issues others experienced were simply not the case with us. There are claims that this toy is a "one trick pony," or in other words that it is only good for one thing. However, the products own webpage has plans for several ways to reconstruct the parts in different configurations.

The bottom line is that if your child is inventive and likes building, they will like this toy. Ours even found uses for the parts with other toys like Legos, Bionicles, etc.

However, it can be annoyingly noisy at times. And pets like dogs can activate it its on/off mechanism pretty easily. Those are the only two warnings I would advise potential purchasers of this product.

I brought this home from [...]this afternoon for my almost 5yo son. While the directions to build the thing were rather intense overall, we were able to put it together in about 3.5 hours or so total. Once it was assembled and the marbles started going, my 4yo went crazy and I had a very tough time getting him to bed.

The build was a little much for him from time to time, but he wouldn't leave the table and go watch cartoons or color his books. I was able to have him help me assemble it by handing me the pieces as I called them out by number (good learning exercise for him for sure).

The marbles do fall off from time to time, you have to watch it. But it's interactive and part of the fun for him is getting the marbles and putting them back into the contraption at different points on the various paths.

The mechanism is a little finicky and I had to re-assemble a screw-ladder portion because it kept jamming. But once I did and set it really good, it started working perfectly.

I had trouble with the sound piece and thought it came DOA. Then I discovered the small on-off switch on the bottom which is very hard to see as it blends right in to the piece itself. After I switched it on it works perfectly as well.

The set came with some extra pieces and a very cool "stopper" piece which wasn't even in the directions (optional placement). My son really enjoyed this aspect as I put it under the sound tunnel so when the sound went off, he knew he had a marble at the stopper to release.

The manual is very well illustrated and easy to follow. They include some good tips on making the build go smoother which I followed. They seemed to help a lot.

Overall, I gave it 4 stars as some of the design could have been a little better/easier (why have a front and back to the six-way connectors?) but it was a steel at 40 dollars from [...] and me and my son are looking forward to putting together some alternate designs (one alternate design is on the website now).

Don't buy this toy. Our kids got this toy for Christmas and it's been nothing but a headache. It took 4 hours to assemble the first time. So it did take a genius to assemble!

But the real intelligence comes in repairing it frequently. It is flimsy and cheaply made. It does not stay together and we have to reassemble portions every time our children try to play.

And the marbles will not stay in the tracks. They end up rolling off the toy and all over the floor.

Save yourself the money. It's a shame that so many toys are cheaply and poorly made these days.

We bought this at Costco thinking it would be a fun family project. It had a 2009 top toy of the year award! Friday evening and in to Saturday we struggled to build this having to contort the plastic beams to try and make the ramps fit the instructions. Several times we returned to the previous instructions to confirm we had started the beams in the right area. The toy is listed as age 8 and up but between my wife and I (both not engineers but with technical backgrounds) we could not complete set up of this toy!!!!! After an extremely frustrating day of coming back to it several times to try again we concluded that it was a waste of time.

Indeed the model set up at Costco was glued together and in an enclosed case in retrospect. Some of the other reviews mentioned the difficulty of keeping the toy together once it was built. I can easily envision this difficulty given my experience of having to repeatedly rebuild sections of the toy even in a half built state.

It is a very cool idea. Perhaps in the toy design engineer world it works well. It could perhaps be redesigned to work well in the real world. For me and my children, it wasted a day of our precious time. Buy something else.

This toy works great. We are very pleased with the Marble Mania set. It took me and my two boys a while to put together (4-5 hours), but the boys wanted to help quite a bit. Once together, the kids have been having a blast with it. The directions were very well done, and easy to follow.

This was such an awesome toy to put together with my kids, ages 8, 9, and 12. My 12 year old especially loved it because he's so into building things. The instruction guide was fairly simple to follow, and it only took us about 2 hours to put together. Then the fun begins watching the marbles zip around! Not only does this toy teach about physics, inertia, speed, and gravity, it also teaches the life skills of patience and problem-solving. I've already purchased more of these marble runs for Christmas (Galaxy and Velocity), and I know what my boys and I will be doing over holidays! They will be so excited to add to their collection. This is a great product for everyone.

This is a miserable toy. We've had it for 3 weeks and so far, none of us has been able to put it together completely. My husband has his masters degree, I have a bachelors, and we have two very intelligent teens. NONE of us have managed to get this toy together. The instuctions are extremely difficult to follow, too many of the pieces are similar and difficult to tell from the pictures in the manual which ones you need in what spot. This was a big waste of money.

I bought this for my nine year old son for Christmas. He likes to play with Lego's and build things so I thought this would be a good toy. It is very complicated and I used the book to build the model they suggested. My son helped build it for a short time and I ended up building 90% of it. We ended up with a wrong piece that is very important for the design so I will have to call the number on the book to get the right piece. Finally I was able to work around it and got everything working but one tower. It seems to difficult to come up with your own designs.

I think allot of reviewers are missing the point of the toy. I was totally pleased that the toy was not as simple as Lego blocks. Building it, just like with Lego, is most of the fun. The pieces have tiny numbers on them so the directions are easy to follow. The red dots on the photographic directions tell you the orientation of certain pieces. Once its together you see why they needed to face a certain way, so when you build your own design you can take this into account. I could not come up with anything as complicated as the directions but the thing came with so many gears I just had to use them for more than decoration. (Note that the picture shows the gears not touching anything that moves. You can see the only moving gears at the bottom center.) Many marbles did fall out and "fixing" it was the next fun task. Yes it was FUN! There were extra pieces left over and you could find more in the design where pieces didn't support anything, or a quick redesign allowed for a conservation of pieces. My four year old says, "It was fun 'cause when we were building it, and I knocked it down, and we built it again, and the marbles fell and I put them back in, and it stopped working, 'cause we put them back together." I think that translates to he liked it. It took a full six hours guiding my 7 year old who put the thing together. Any excuse to spend that much time with the kids in an organized non competitive play is worth the money. If you don't have the time or patients then pass on this toy. I found it for under $50 so shop wise.

I thought this was going to be like Legos - build it their way first, then be able to build other ways. Well, no. First time to build it took 5 hours. It tells you this in the manual on page 2, but no where else. Once its built, its neat to watch. But making a new design? Maybe something simple, not so tall, without the overlapping tracks. The web site you are referred to has no additional designs for this set. And I could find no others on the Web. Overall, I and my two daughters are pretty disappointed with this toy. Especially after paying almost eighty bucks.