KITRONIK 5603 Inventor's Kit for micro:bit - 10 Experiments

This is a great piece of kit. You'll need to buy the Micro Bit separately for around £17.This kit comes with a nicely detailed book. The book takes you through 10 experiments, each one getting harder than the next. It shows how to wire up the breadboard and program the Micro Bit via the web, it also shows you the circuit diagram.My 12 year old loved it and already completed the first experiment in about 10 mins.

Breadboard and adapter make it super easy to connect components to your microbit. They are just normal components, so you can connect anything to it. Writing diagrams and code examples are clear and simple.

Bought this as a Christmas present for son as he is in a computer club at school and this is one of the things they use. He had hours of fun doing experiments.

Excellent educational toy for my 7 year old who is obsessed with tech. One star knocked off as it had an addendum to the instructions in the box - it would have been better to reprint the manual.

Excellent product but arrived in a box that showed exactly what was inside. As this was going to be a present that was a little disappointing. However it was mentioned in the small print when I look back at the item description, so I will learn from that. Never the less nice product.

For some context, I have an 8 and 10 year old and have done lots of volunteering teaching children to use microbits (including some basic stuff with the pins). I'm not an electronics person by any stretch - I'm more a programmer - but I did A-level physics and have used a breadboard before so I've got some relevant background.The key thing that the kit gives you is the edge connector kit so you can use it with the breadboard with jumper wires etc. It also comes with some basic bits and bobs (LEDs, a photoresistor, a motor, a transistor etc) to play with. It's quite affordable and a nice way to get that sort of functionality with some components thrown so you're not having to source that separately if you don't already have them.The main thing that lets it down for me is the manual and projects. They get far too complicated far too quickly. The manual doesn't do a great job of explaining the basics - I can't imagine any children inventing their own stuff after going through the projects and I also think most children are going to need a considerable amount of adult assistance. I suspect it's trying to give the kids exciting things to do to motivate them, but I think that there is a lot going on with both the microbit code, the pins and the breadboard and it's just all too much. Perhaps even just changing the order of the projects would have helped, but ideally it would have had a series of various easy projects to start with.There's a lot that you can do wrong too - positioning of wires, getting components the wrong way round, broken components, getting the code wrong and it's going to be really hard for a kid to debug - three of the first five projects didn't work for me first time! I think be leaping into more complicated projects rather than building on simpler ones, it is much harder to spot what is wrong.If anybody is interested here is the list of projects:- Pressing push switches to press the buttons on the microbit- Phototransistor to show different sets of LEDs on the microbit- Dimming an LED with a phototransistor - push switch to turn on and off, writes potentiometer reading to the the value driving the LED- Using a transistor to drive a motor- Using the accelerometer on the microbit and a transistor to control motor speed.- Setting the tone on the piezo buzzer using the music functions on the microbit- Spinning the fan on a motor to generate a voltage and measuring this- A hot-cold game using the compass on the accelerometer - LED blinks faster if you are closer to correct- A circuit that charges a capacitor and measures its charge and displays it on the LED- A circuit using an RGB LEDProjects 1-6 use the Makecode visual editor for Projects 1-6 and Projects 7-10 use Javascript, so there is also a sudden switch there.In summary, if this had had a much more carefully thought out manual, it could have been a really great set. I will definitely use the kit with my children (and possibly volunteering though think that is less likely) but I think I'm going to have to come up with various projects of my own.

Excellent kit in combination with BBC Microbit. The best part? The manual, indeed well written with good examples.

Arrived in good condition, all complete, very speedy delivery in time for Christmas. The kit is varied and has plenty to keep us occupied and experimenting.