Thames & Kosmos 620417 Electricity and Magnetism

I bought this for my grandson, but my son, and electrician / programmer got quite excited by it as a teaching tool for some of the people at work. So, yes it's meant for age 8+ but has potential as well for a classroom situation, etc., as well. Well made, well packaged, colourful, and fun as well.

Ease of use: For my 6 y.o. son was brilliant. He spent all month with this toy, created something new and showed friends

My kid is 5+ yrs old and she loves this kit and does te experiments on her own by reading the book

My 9 year old son is obsessed with anything having to do with building circuits and recently has been interested in magnetism, so this seemed a good set to try next. It did not disappoint. Some of the pieces were a little tricky to snap together, but I didn't mind helping him. It seems to get easier the more he uses it. He found it very engaging overall. I love the explanations for what is going on in each experiment. Definitely recommend for any child who is into this sort of thing.

My 8 year old enjoys and is learning a lot from this kit. It is great triggering the curiousity of someone who has no background in electricity or circuits. While the parts look simplistic, they are designed as small blocks (like legos) so you can experiment with many different ways of assembling them to see what happens. You can try as many different combinations as you can imagine, and the surprising results (which lights turn on or off, whether or not the fan blows, etc) make you think hard about why and how the electricity works the way it does (especially when you have multiple circuits running in parallel and things like that). The simple block format makes it attractive to a child who wants to play but isn't a hard-core techie (yet). Having said that, the instruction booklet is perhaps overly complicated, describing the experiments and questions in ways that become boring to my daughter. We'll see if that changes as she gets more experienced with it. And because of that complexity, the magnetism experiments aren't so interesting to her as the electricity experiments.