Advanced STEM Kit for Young Adults 13+ Years | XL | Build Your Own Game Console | Real Soldering Experience | DIY Fun and Educational Project | 100+ Retro Games

I don’t know why people having such a hard time with this. It’s an electronics project. Buy the tools, follow along with the video. Easy peazy. It worked right away and my 10 year old cannot put it down. Next is coding and fun.

I choose this as a Christmas present for my Grandson But it's a bit to advanced for him right now. Maybe in a couple more years.

To start with, they use nylon threads. In the first one I got they were defective, bent and stripped. I had to get a replacement unit from Amazon. Luckily I used both to make one good unit because the replacement also had messed up nylon threads. After all that, it doesn't even matter because half the games on this thing do NOT work! I contacted them and they confirmed, all the games came from their older unit and they do not work on this unit. They knew this and they shipped it anyway with no ETA on a fix. Also, half way through our correspondence, they stop responding. It has been months and they will no longer respond to me. So maybe skip this one completely and just find something else because you wont get any resolve from these people. EDIT: Also, after a couple months it stopped working. Screen wont turn on anymore. You can hear sounds as it starts a game when you start smashing buttons. Just no screen. Complete waste of money!

When it said 'some soldering required' it means every single component has to be soldered together. Instructions were clear and it was a good learning experience. Unfortunately, we have been unable to play any games on it. Part of the process of installing games is adding the board libraries to the Arduino IDE (program that allows your computer to talk to the game board). It must be downloaded from GitHub. None of the sources are being maintained any more and thus the necessary libraries will not download. I looked on the ArduBoy site (the games provider) and communities but have been unable to find a work around. It looks cool but is currently nothing but a paper weight.

15 year old was unable to put it together in order to work. The company was nice about sending a piece that broke in the first try. But after putting it together again, another piece broke, which we were able to find a replacement part. On the final try, the screen was blank/error in the middle...so was unusable. Only positive was it was a learning experience, I guess. We were excited about the code to transfer onto the device, but never got to see it in action. Bummer.