Tag Archives: STEM toys

Holiday Gift Guide, Toys

Benspark’s Holiday Gift Guide – GEOMAG Mechanics Gravity Sets

Geomag Sets

The folks at Geomag sent us a couple of free sets from their Mechanics Line of toys. Opinions are my own.

These are fantastic toys to stimulate the imaginations and creative spirit of your kids. A great STEM toy that you can give your children or even play around with yourself. I spent over an hour working on my design after I open the Geomag Mechanics Gravity Shoot and Catch Set. I will open the Gravity Motor set as well and I look forward to the creations we will make when I combine the two.

When I was at the HoliDAY of Play I checked out these sets and was very impressed. The cool thing about them is that anything that moves on the sets is driven by magnets either being attracted to each other or repelled. That was so cool to see. I knew that this would be a set that we would enjoy as a family. I know that the kids have all sorts of crazy fun ideas and that they would work with the pieces to create something special. They will but first I took over the whole thing and made my own crazy machine. It is combination of two of the builds from the instructions for the Shoot and Catch set. You can see it in the video below.

You can learn more about the GEOMAG Mechanics Gravity sets on their website. You can purchase them for the holiday season through the Geomag Amazon.com store. This link is an affiliate link of ours. If you use it then it costs you nothing extra but it helps us out. If you’d like to go directly to a couple of the sets check out these links.

Review, Toys, Video Game

Review: Nintendo Labo Vehicle Kit

3 Comments

Nintendo Labo Toycon 3 Kit

We recently received two Nintendo LABO kits, the Variety Kit and the Vehicle Kitc (A Toy Insider STEM 10 Winner 2018). While we enjoy both I am partial to the vehicle kit. We received the kits for free and opinions are 100% our own. I have some affiliate links below that you can use to get the kits for yourselves. So far I’ve built the steering wheel and a I am looking forward to building more of the kit over the holiday break. I built the steering wheel first because I enjoy driving games the most. I’m not the best flyer. At least with Driving I am good about not overcompensating the turns. In flight, I am an ungainly bird. I’m also excited about the submarine toycon. That looks very interesting and I can’t wait to explore under the sea with Andrew and Eva.

Eva Driving the Nintendo Labo

I built the steering wheel by myself. It took a long time to do and I knew that Andrew would not have the patience to do it. He does enjoy helping and folding the cardboard but only for a little while. I didn’t want to start and then have to stop down to entertain him as we built the toycon. I just knew that he would want to get right to driving using the steering wheel and gas pedal toycons. So I built everything while the kids were at school. The game comes with video step by step instructions on how to fold and assemble all the toycons. This is a very efficient and entertaining way to so this, I will let him work with me a little as we make the flight stick and the submarine.

When I introduced the steering wheel to the kids they were excited. We started the adventure game that comes with the Nintendo Labo Vehicle Kit. Kids can drive, fly and go under the water through this game. The kids have become great little drivers. They have played a few times and each time I am more impressed with how fluidly they make the car go. They even expertly fuel it up during their travels.

The Vehicle Kit’s steering wheel is a genius product. I love how, through the use of cardboard and rubber bands, we can make a fully functional steering wheel. The setup uses all points of the joycon and this includes sending infrared signals to the joycon from the assembled toycon. Using reflective tape strips enabled the joycon to receive special signals through the IR receivers.

There are many more things that we can do with this kit and the joycons. Eventually we will get into the programming aspect of this toy and then the kids will be off on their own creating experimental games with the joycons and testing out the coding options.I certainly want to learn more about that.

Continue reading Review: Nintendo Labo Vehicle Kit →