Last Saturday I opened two of these kits and worked with my granddaughters. We first built the head unit and got the little motor turning the gears and shaft (be careful to trim the nibs off the blue spacer otherwise it hangs up and the motor doesn't turn the gears smoothly). We built the boat robot and had races in the sink. Next time we'll do another robot. Lots and lots of Saturday fun ahead.

Really interesting concept. I wouldn't say it's the most impressive quality, but as a learning exercise and a basic & minimal representation of a solar bot project it's quite nice for an easy more approachable step in that direction. The visual instruction book is in black & white, which is less helpful than if it were in color. It's nice that you get several options that you can go with for your build. It's a fun project and learning opportunity. The parts come on plastic tabs, that you have to break them off of. May require some extra shaving of excess plastic on components. The little one's find the whole building block style kit exciting already. The solar functionality was even more so exciting for them.

Likes:
- Can be less messy when working with a kit on the plastic breakaway tabs. No stray parts if you break off what you need.
- Fun design, with multiple options for how you could approach.
- The idea of solar bots is cool in and of itself.
- A fun educational or hobby exercise.

Dislikes:
- Black & white instructions. Color is helpful when relying on visual instructions.
- Minimal kit and quality is enough to learn and enjoy, but not impressive enough to compete with more advanced kits.
- Plastic tab design can require a bit more work to shave excess bits off parts.

My youngest niece is 13 and is very active in STEM. She is on her middle school Robotics Team. She wants to build rovers to go to space. I sent this too her and she loves it. She was building away so much that her dad had to say finish your homework! Great for kids interested in STEM.

I got these robotic toy kits for two kids 6 and 8 years old. I have gotten a few robotic toy kits before, as the toy allows the kids to gain hands-on experience in assembling things and learn some basic concepts of science and engineering with adults' help. In this case, dual energy source from solar energy, and stored chemical energy from battery converted into mechanical energy to power the robot toy. Also the kids learn how gears and wheels work. The toy is a 12 in 1 set, and 12 different robots can be built, except disassembling is needed going from one to another (a negative). The kids will be awarded with a finished toy that they can play with. I do not expect the kids to complete all 12 versions as it will take a long time and disassembling one to go to another may break some parts. It would be good if they could try out a few interesting ones.

I do not expect kids to fully assemble them on their own. Usually, I got them and guided them and figured out the steps along the way. Taught them some things about mechanical and electrical concepts during the assembly to grow their interest and knowledge. It is not a one time thing and hopefully after a few toy assemblies, the kids will understand the concept, and how to assemble things better and better,

We got this product for three science loving kids to share. The overall product is disappointing - while it had some magic moments the final product just has too many shortcomings to really recommend it.
The number one issue is that the motors just aren't powerful enough to overcome the low quality of the parts, especially when run on solar power. The gears in particular are full of imperfections and cannot be used right off the sprue - they need to be trimmed down (and not just at the connection points, there are tons of imperfections that look like they come from the molds). Since trimming them requires a sharp knife of some sort you are going to have to take that ages 8-13 thing with a grain of sand.
After I had trimmed up the pieces, we found that some of the assembly was a little tricky. The plastic is soft enough that you fill find pieces that are forced will deform rather than snap, but it is still a little tricky. We also found that we had to spend a lot of time adjust the "fit" of the pieces so that the motors would work. Too tight and the motor locks up due to friction. Too loose and the pieces will bend and slip rather than transfer the motion.
The assembled robots are cute and when they work they do bring a lot of delight for about 2 minutes before they get bored with watching it march/drive/float back and forth. We found that disassembling the robots could be just a finicky as assembling them. In fact our only truly broken piece came on disassembly.
Sure its fun to build the different robots, but they don't really do anything once they are built. Younger kids can't put this together themselves and older kids will sort of shrug once they see how limited the assembled robots are.