Best Early Development Activity Centers
Early learning center has 5 piano keys that play music and encourage creativity; wheels work on carpeted and hard floors.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I saw the issues about the wheels sliding on hard floors, being too light to support a child while standing up, going too fast and kids falling on their face... Wheels sliding on hard floors... False, there is a rubber seam on the rear wheels that prevents side to side motion. My 12 month old (recieved this for his birthday) uses the locked setting on the main floor where it's hard floor and the free spinning setting on the carpet."
"Let me also clear up any confusion on why my LO likes this walker - My LO likes this as a toy, loves the music and sounds. - There are two settings to control the speed of the walker (however, we have never used more than one which is the slowest - We have used this walker on hardwood floors - you might want to use the faster setting if using on carpet). - The musical unit will keep your LO entertained for hours! We have had a couple falls, not really bad ones, and while I understand that kids fall and hurt themselves, its not fun when your LO is attempting to stand with the walkers help and the walker slips and runs away. All in all, this was much better than the other walkers we tried. The other name brand walker we purchased was no where in comparison to this walker. Please note - pediatricians now recommend not using a walker, I feel if you are constantly watching over your LO this is probably the safest walker and the most fun walker out there - minus the differences in the older and the newer models."
"A few days later, still a little sad that I couldn't find anything else, a friend of mine posted a video of her kiddos (she has twins) playing with the same toy I wasn't buying!! If your baby is ready to start walking then this toy is absolutely wonderful but please know that if your baby cannot stand on their own, then they are not ready to be walking with this toy so just get it for them to press the buttons since it can be easily removed until they can stand and walk with it. That is what it is made for. I gave the educational value a four because while there are a million things on it that baby can learn from, they probably are not going to because they will be so busy wanting to push a million other buttons."
"Little tip: If you have hard wood floors they can get going kind of fast especially when they are first learning to control their walking."
Electrical parts provide students grades 2 and up (age 7+) with hands-on experience designing and building models of working electrical circuits. Includes 30 parts, and instructions for over 100 projects, including working models of a photo sensor, a flashing light, and an adjustable-volume siren.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"As a kid (more years ago than I care to admit) I played with the Phillips electronics set; it came with multiple values of resistors, capacitors, inductors, a few transistors, switches, and wires, instructions to make about 30 different circuits and a booklet which explained how and why things worked. If you hope it will teach at least elementary electronics, you (like me) will be disappointed. I will list first the positives: 1) my 9-years-old child took to it like fire to straw; in the first 24 hours since opening the box (including one full day of school) he has blazed without help through about 2/3 of the projects, and shows no sign of getting bored. 2) all components worked. 3) the molded-plastic box liner helps keep the pieces neatly organized and identify what might have been dropped on the floor and risks being forgotten at the end of the play session. There is two IC, a couple switches, an input and output unit each for sound and light, a DC motor, a battery holder; the rest could be replaced with unbent paperclips, and nobody would be the wiser."
"He also played with similar, though much more complex kits, beginning at the age of 9 (but he was far more advanced in engineering skills than his peers) and had a blast. The first thing we noticed about the kit, especially for me considering I wasn't really exposed to circuits as a child aside from a brief period in junior high, was that for the most part you couldn't just look at the pieces as a newb and understand what they were. After going through maybe 6-8 different configurations (and believe me, those would be pretty cool for someone who had never worked with circuits before) we stopped, because flipping through the book we found we weren't seeing a whole lot of additional variety. To get the full value you need to not only follow the circuit configurations to achieve a certain output (fan, dimmed light, siren) but also really read and understand why certain things are happening and how each unique piece contributes to that. I'd recommend this for your budding 8-year old junior engineer, or purchase it for your ~12-year old when they start learning about this sort of thing in school. I doubt it would keep my 6-year old niece's attention, even if we worked through it with her, but we'll hold on to it to see how she progresses over time and will share it with other kids we know as it makes sense to."
"However, if you're giving multiple gifts to the child, or gifting multiple children then the 100 provides enough variation in projects to keep the kids well entertained."
"Inside the box are 30 parts and a colorful instruction manual with 100 projects that is very easy to follow. The parts are color-coded, and clearly marked, so they are easy to identify!"
They form an emotional bond - I’ve never seen so many kids hug a littleBits invention before. They believe in our mission, and we’re part of a movement getting kids to use their imaginations and invent the world they want to live in. They can take their Droid apart and put it back together in new ways to give it additional abilities or make it perform new tasks. Droid-driving is easy with in-app controllers including a joystick, sliders, and tilt mode. The Droid can detect obstacles in front of it and change course like it has a mind of its own. You could win one of 6 prizes like kits, gift cards, or a trip to Lucasfilm. Customizable: Missions help kids get creative, inventing new Droids & giving them personality.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Now about the kit: Pros: - The package is awesome, looks super premium and worth far more than $100. - The SW music in the app is so cool, we had goosebumps. - The app looks authentically Star Wars, and the instructions are 3D videos as opposed to old lego instruction booklets that I’m used to. - The R2 D2 takes about an hour to make, and we did it as a family which was really fun. - After you make the R2D2, there are “missions” that teach you how to break it down, build something different, leverage different sensors to make his head turn, force drive, fist bump, drawing etc that was super cool. - The customization element was heaps of fun, we got a white sticker sheet that allowed us redesign our droid, once we had finished with the blue sticker version. I was genuinely impressed with how my kids were applying the things they learned in the build experience, to everyday things, all while having so much fun."
"My kids were able to get everything assembled and working in about 1-2 hours (probably would have been the shorter side if they didn't argue :). The assembly of the droid is great and I enjoyed watching them use their problem solving skills to put it together."
"It's seemingly pre-programmed specifically for the included "droid" activities, and there's no ability to write your own programs of any sort. There's a sheet that tells you to plug the battery, cable, power, and Control Hub blocks together and then download the app for your phone/tablet device. The app starts up with the familiar original John Williams Star Wars episode IV score music and welcomes you to the Droid Inventor Training Program. You start with four training missions which comprise the assembly of the basic remotely-driveable droid configuration. One mission has you add the stickers to complete the "style" of your droid, the next one is "obstacle course" where it has you set up some obstacles using things you have around the house, and then tells you to time how long it takes you to drive the droid through the course (it's up to you to manually drive the droid, there's nothing fancy here), the next mission has you record a voice message through the app and it then gets downloaded to the control hub in the droid and it becomes one of the sound options you can trigger from the app while you're controlling the droid. The last Level 2 mission is to attack a felt pen holder to the back of the droid which lets you drop a felt-tip or similar marker in and draw a trail behind the droid. The remaining activities are as follows: Intruder alarm (assemble the droid using the proximity detection block to trigger an alarm when the proximity is detected), Arm wave (assembling the droid using the servo to wave the robot's arm on proximity detection), Self Navigation (using the proximity detector to enable stop, backup, turn left, resume navigation), Force Mode (where you put the proximity detector behind the droid and follow it around using your hand to "push" it), and Head Controls where you assemble it using the motor to rotate the head of the droid. The Level 4 missions are simply ideas for making a custom head and body for the droid. 3) Every time you start an activity, it forces you to go through all the steps of assembly before you can run the actual activity. So if you've built say one of the Level 3 mission configurations and just want to start it up again, you're forced to watch 25+ step videos telling you how to assemble the droid from scratch EVERY TIME. Note that while the video shows the droid rotating its head and sticking out its arm, there's only one servo and one motor in the kit, so you can't have it set up to do these functions AND be able to move around. Looks great (the box and components look especially enticing at the start, the bits are colorful and seem to offer great promises of flexibility and experimentation), well made, the iOS app works acceptably well (with the above noted annoyances), but in the end I think a lot of kids may get bored with it after the first day."
Best Sorting & Stacking Baby Toys
These chunky, colorful blocks help introduce colors and shapes as babies sort, stack and drop the blocks through the slots in the bucket lid. 10 colorful blocks to sort, stack and drop.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"One, that was too many different shapes for a little one, and two I had to open it cause they couldn't. The point here is this is easy to open, my eight month old can do it easily because the lid doesn't SNAP on."
";). Nice and colorful and does what we expected as a safe stacking learning toy (but remind whoever opens it - you really should give it a quick rinse first!"
"Something about blocks and a bucket, kids love to play with this."
"Saw this toy at the doctor's office and my son was drawn to it."
"These are great."
"I remember having one of these as a child."
"It promotes problem solving, knowledge of colors, and shapes."
"My 12 month old doesn't seem to mind but it makes it difficult to teach her to sort the shapes."