Education - STEM Explorations: Roller Coaster Set ‚ 546 Pieces, Creative Building Set‚ Ages 8+

I love connects my daughter is starting to use them the only problem we had was unless this is on a flat floor surface and is weighted down it does not work properly. You have to literally put books toward the bottom to keep it from wobbling as the coaster is going around or it won't make it through the loop and back around so it could get caught and drug backup

This K’NEX EDUCATION STEM EXPLORATIONS: ROLLER COASTER BUILDING SET is challenging to build, but it’s a satisfying building set. It’s motorized, and it performs really well. It’s fun to watch the chain pull the roller coaster car up to the top of the tower. And of course it’s fun to watch the car do the curves and loops of the track by gravity when it’s released. It took me a couple of days, working off and on, to assemble this roller coaster. The K’NEX pieces are fiddly to join, and the drawings in the instruction booklet are hard to interpret if you’re new to the K’NEX system. (The “snowflake” connectors are confusing; the rods must be inserted “just so”; and the drawings sometimes change their directional perspective without warning.) What I really loved about this set, is that the roller coaster car will often go around the loop more than once without any help. Three continuous loops is fairly common. Whether the car continues to loop by itself seems to depend on where the “chain-grabber” underneath the car hits the chain—whether it hits an opening in the chain or not. If you’re aiming for continuous loops, it helps to hold the base down. The K’NEX rods are thin, so the roller coaster support structure is kind of flimsy. However, the connections are tight enough that you can pick the whole structure up and move it without destroying it. A few connections may come loose, but they’re easy to reconnect. The roller coaster is a large structure (30” wide, 16” deep, 25” high), so you need quite a bit of space to build and play with it. The three experiments (one included in the box, two downloadable from the K’NEX web site) add to the educational value of this building set. The first experiment suggests adding different amounts of weight to the car to test how added mass affects the car’s ability to run the loops. For the second and third experiments, you rebuild the coaster into a long gravity ramp, and then into a half pipe, to learn more about how a car behaves on a straight or U-shaped track. Neither of these builds makes use of the motor, which is why the roller coaster build is far and away the best. When you open the box, keep the contents of each bag together, more or less. You’ll save time if you don’t dump all of the pieces out in a big pile on the tabletop. The pieces that are the same type are grouped together in the plastic bags—chain links, rods of certain lengths, red connectors, blue connectors, spacers, etc. When I’m assembling a big project like this one, with a lot of pieces, I use disposable plastic dinner and salad plates to hold the similar, or the same-colored, parts. A nice thing about this K’NEX set is that each different type of connector is a different color (the orange connectors are different from the yellow connectors, and so on), so it’s enough to check the color of the piece when you’re following the instructions.

I got this for my 7 year old who loves building anything. The instructions were good and he only needed help with a few areas. It took about two sessions to build this set as there are many steps and lots of pieces. Like others have said, the actual rolled coaster gets stuck and does not have enough inertia to actually make the loop at the bottom. We had adjusted some pieces to make it work. It’s just not something you want to run into after working on building it for so long but we made it work.

I bought this for my son, who was 9 at the time. He's now 10 and this set is still working well and gets played with again and again. To begin, my son followed all of the included instructions and everything worked fine, but like other mentioned, sometimes the cart would not "catch" and go up the tallest peak on its own. No big deal. My son loves reworking and rebuilding things, so at that point he changed the track multiple times to make it work better, have more loops, etc. It's provided hours of play and entertainment. All of the pieces have held up well with no breakage, even though they are tinier than the standard K'nex. It's a nice set that I would purchase again.

I ordered this for my son and I to put together. The first order said it was supposed to be delivered about 2 days after I placed it. I let my son know the day it was supposed to arrive that we would be putting together a rollercoaster. He was very excited and asked repeatedly if it arrived. The order kept saying it would show up before 10pm. All the way till 11pm... The only thing Amazon support could come up with was putting in another order. I was a bit upset but I went ahead and put in another order for the rollercoaster hoping this one would show up before the weekend. The second order showed up. We put everything together only to find out at the very end that there are missing parts. So now I have a half put together pile of plastic sticks sitting on my coffee table and one sad 3 year old.

I bought this for my 13 year old Grandson. It arrived quickly. He normally uses Legos but wanted to try something different. He said the pieces are smaller and hurt his fingers to put it together. The directions were easy to follow. All in all he did enjoy the build and the finished product. He does not recommend this for younger than 12.

I gave this to my 9 year old grandson for Christmas. He’s very good at Lego, but this required many steps and patience, so we worked together on it. When it was finally finished the car would not make it through the last loop for the full cycle. What I like about this set is they give lots of tips at the end, so I encouraged my grandson to think how we might change it to get the car to go through that loop. After both of us trying this and that, I’m proud to say my grandson “fixed” the track to give the car the momentum to do the whole track. It is an excellent product and promotes teamwork and problem solving!

Fun project but the alignment has a 0 margin of error for it to work properly.

arrivé avec soin

Diversa dai soliti lego, su altre recensioni avevo letto che era difficile da montare, invece con mio figlio ci abbiamo messo poco tempo. Non stabilissima quando è in movimento ma davvero divertente

Leuke achtbaanset voor kids van 7-8 jaar. Voor jongere kids alleen om te kijken en een beetje mee te helpen.Frustrerend als het karretje niet door de looping gaat. Dit lijkt eerst onderdeel van de set te zijn om te experimenteren, maar ook met extra gewicht gaat de wagen niet door de looping. Oplossing: karretje insmeren met siliconenspray.

Muy didáctico y funciona bien, solo que cuesta trabajo que el carrito de la vuelta completa

My 12y old grandson loved building the rollercoaster, then proceeded to build his own version with more parts he and his friends found on ebay. A great hit with all of them for hours of creative play