Smithsonian Science Activities Smithsonian Finger Print Kit Gray

My 7 year old LOVED receiving this as a gift. I especially loved the instructions on a poster so he can hang it up and use again and again!

My son used it as a part of his Science Fair Project, totally loved it!!!

With the different parts this will keep our granddaughter occupied for a long, long time. She enjoys using it with family members.

Got it for my daughter for christmas. She was super excited! Great little kit to add to her ever growing "spy" kit.

We are looking foward to gift our son this kit. He is a curios boy that pretends he is a soy daily!

This kit isn't really worth $20 unless you are giving as a gift since you can do this fingerprinting activity with household products you already have. It contains: a tiny regular inkpad, a 2oz bottle of sodium bicarbonate powder (aka baking soda), a small brush (like a make up brush or small paintbrush), regular clear/scotch tape, a bulb syringe (to blow a puff of air), a piece of small black glossy paper, and a small magnifying glass (the magnifying glass didn't work well for me and I ended up using a larger one I had).You find or make a clean fingerprint on a household surface then dip the make up brush in the baking soda, hold it over the print to sprinkle the powder onto the print, then blow the excess powder away, put the scotch tape on the print, then take it off and tape it to the black pad for contrast.The kit contains a poster with a brief guide on fingerprint types as well as many other basic forensic techniques but nothing different than you would find in an internet search. There is also a small book which is for fingerprinting people using the small inkpad but the squares for the fingerprints in the book are too small for all but a child's prints so I'm printing off my own pages with squares for fingerprinting. You just press your finger on the inkpad and then onto the paper so you can compare the 'lifted' prints with the people you have fingerprinted.All in all, might be good for a gift since it has all the components together but for my purposes (doing a detective activity with kids) I could have done this for much less than $20 if I had researched more. Hope this helps.Oh, it also has a strip of 'DO NOT CROSS' crime tape (maybe 10 ft) which is probably the most valuable thing in it as I couldn't find that for less than $8 in a quick search.

I had used other fingerprint powder before trying this kit, and this was a gritty sand-like texture that wouldn't lift a good fingerprint off of any surface. The granular type nature of it made it difficult to read what print you could get to stick to the tape, which wasn't very sticky. Even with my own tape that was better quality, you couldn't get a good print. The information in the kit is good, and the other materials would good to use with better powder.

My kiddos have been all about becoming detectives lately so this kit definitely took it to the next level....