Customer Reviews

Learning Resources - Gears! Gears! Gears!  Lights and Action Building Set

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My 5 year old son with Asperger's enjoys this toy. He likes to put puzzles together and this satisfies his need to put together and pull apart. While not as challenging as puzzle, the flashing lights hold his attention longer than I think it would without lights and the spiral/design stickers. What is also a plus is that my 7 month old loves to watch her brothers put this together and put it into motion. The pieces are sturdy and snap together firmly and operate smoothly. This is a fun toy, however, for older children it doesn't provide as much stimulation as, say, Legos.

I don't know why there are so many complaints. My five and nine year olds really enjoy this; we've had no issues at all with quality. For those parents who don't want to spend quality time with their kids building things, then you probably shouldn't get it. My five year old has surprised me, though, with what he can build on his own. A unique, fun toy!

Great toy...the kids left for their bedroom and started creating immediately. My nephew took it to all the family gatherings and all the cousins love it. The best part...it took them away from the video games for at least 4 days. All my other nephews want one now. Great Toy...even the fathers got into it with thier kids.

The pieces do not allow much flexibility in how the gears can go together. The plates allow only a standard grid arrangement. The vertical pieces allow the gears to interact at right angles, but this does not work at all as well as one would hope. The larger gears cannot interact with the smaller gears using the grid arrangement of the base plates - they simply do not fit that grid. You can only put a big gear on top of a little one, which looks good in pictures, but in reality does not actually contribute to the mechanism.

My son is four, turning five. He gets this toy out and tries to play with it. He really wants it to be as much fun as it looks on the bucket. However, it simply does not allow enough mechanical creativity. You have to place gears on the provided template, and then essentially decorate them with the (otherwise pointless) larger gears, lights, and slinkies.

Any string of more than about four gears simply overwhelms the motor, stalling it. Because you cannot place gears in anything but a very rigid arrangement of columns and rows, the product is always mechanically uninteresting. The slinkies and lights make it look more interesting and active, but if I had wanted slinkies and strobe lights, I could have gotten those without buying a bucket of poorly engineered gears.

We have a magnetic set of gears on our fridge that is from a different company, for a younger age. Because those gears can be positioned freely relative to each other, it is, in fact, a far more interesting toy. I would be interested in finding a version of this that is well-engineered, rather than being well-marketed,

This birthday present has delivered a fair amount of fun so far and my granddaughter (just turned 7) enjoyed building her first creation, but I question a couple of things. As a newly self-proclaimed tomboy :) she insisted on presents a boy would like, and I hoped this would fit the bill. She's not had the basic gear set but I hoped she'd be successful with this one and would be especially motivated because of the motorized action and lights. The set comes in a nice barrel shaped tub which makes clean up fairly easy and storage super. The tub is plenty big enough to hold all the pieces without a problem, however you do have to take apart the base to fit those pieces in. We may have just gotten a set with extra tough fasteners, but putting those flat squares together to form the base was REALLY hard. They didn't want to slide together or be pushed together and I ended up with a few bruises for my efforts (very forceful pushing), but eventually got them to fit together.

The kids (big brother helped just a little) then set to figuring out how to get the gear pieces to interlock so that they turned one another in multiple directions. After a few false starts they had success and developed a fairly elaborate setup that would go both forward and backward with the motorized control and the lights flashed appropriately (and were greatly enjoyed). They were very pleased with their creation, but then disassembled it and put the pieces back in the tub. I wonder if it will be sought out for play again. So far, it hasn't.

I think that for children who love building and are always looking for another way to satisfy that urge, plus are reasonably handy with interlocking pieces, this set is a good choice. It offers the opportunity for imaginative play and repeated use for the right child. On the other hand, it may be a one-trick wonder for children who don't have that natural need to build and rebuild.

My son enjoys playing with this toy. He likes building and this provides multiple opportunities to do that. The lights and sounds add the extra fun and enjoyment with or without the lights on.

I purchased this toy for my 4 1/2 year old son for Christmas and he loves it. It is easily one of his favorite toys. He is very interested in blocks, Legos and building-type toys so this was perfect for him. The flashing lights and slinky-like pieces make it extra fun.

Both my 7-yr old son and 5-yr old daughter love this toy. They both make lots of "inventions" with it and play together well whenever they are doing it together. Overall, it has been great bang for the buck, much more so than many other Christmas gifts that cost more and have sat mostly idle in the three weeks since.

One thing that was pretty nice about this toy is that it is easy for you to copy the things from the cover. After about a week, I got a little bit bored of it, because my baby brother got into it and spread the pieces all over the house. The coolest thing was that I could make a fake UFO out of the motor when I put on a blinker light.

I bought this toy last Christmas for my son who was turning 5. I wanted something fun, interactive, and a bit educational. It's built well, nice colors. My son liked the flashing lights, the psychedelic stickers, and the control of the motor. Unfortunately, he just didn't play with this toy very often. I think there were some early challenges with assuring the gears were placed properly to run. But he's smart, and enjoys puzzles and things that move, so I don't think that was the deal breaker. He doesn't usually mind trial and error. I just don't think it had the power to stay interesting for him that long. Perhaps he would have liked the robot gears better. I can tell you that it comes in a nice bucket that is easy to repack and to store.