Engineering Makerspace Geared Up Gadgets By Thames & Kosmos

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Engineering Makerspace Geared Up Gadgets is one of a new set of STEM Construction Kits by Thames & Kosmos. The kits are suitable from 8 years up and explore everything from vehicles to robots providing kids with well thought out projects that explore the physics of force, motion, energy, levers and more.

What’s In The Engineering Makerspace Geared Up Gadgets Kit

The Geared Up Gadgets kit is designed to teach kids about the physics of gears and transmission through build and play

It comes with 114 pieces and a 28-page manual with step by step illustrated instructions that allow kids to build five fun gadgets.

The 5 projects allow children to:

• create a helicopter model with a rotor that spins using a rubber band-powered motor.
• assemble a spinner toy launches a fast-spinning top.
• make a centripetal force machine that flings its arms outward at high speeds.
• build a hand-mixer that demonstrates a gear train.
• construct a cool aircraft launcher that flings a model vehicle across the room on a zipline.

For the most part the instructions are easy enough to follow but there were a couple of steps that had us scratching our head trying to work out which way round the pieces were supposed to be.

It’s all well made and comes with a small yellow tool to help get the connector pieces in place but we found we didn’t need them and using fingers was fine. Having said that the tool definitely comes in handy when taking the models apart!

We made the spinner which when finished worked really well and kept its shape when the gears were prepped to spin.

The only disappointing part was both elastic bands breaking after a couple of turns.

I’m hoping we were just unlucky rather than it being poor quality. Either way it was easy to replace and actually, we found a thicker elastic band was much easier to use and seemed to give it a greater spin.

What Is Engineering Makerspace

Includes:

Currently, the Engineering Makerspace kits available include

• Kinetic Machines 
• Geared Up Gadgets
• Alien Robots 
• Off Road Rovers