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

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.

The media could not be loaded. 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!

The media could not be loaded. 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.

Poor design. Son was very disappointed. The way its supposed to go together doesn't work. Not enough speed to get through the loop. I think park of the problem is the tiny knex pieces when the car goes it shakes the whole track. I went back through it to make sure everything was right it still didn't work. I could design it better bt not enough pieces. Im gonna get a real full size knex roller coaster on ebay for him.

Great toy! It was a bit too difficult for my 7 yr old to put together so we helped. He had a blast with it once it was finished. We however had a few missing parts when building it but we're able to make due. Overall fun toy. Pretty large in size and needs a goo's amount of space.

I personally found this to be an annoying toy, makes a huge mess and very flimsy but my daughter really enjoyed it so I gave it five stars.

All parts were there and this thing is awesome! I put it together in 4 hours and everything worked great. I only had to remove one of the chain pieces for a tighter fit. Buy this!! It is so entertaining! I do have to recommend building this in segments though, because the tips of my fingers hurt. Worth it.If anything, I would have liked this to include 1 or 2 extras of the pieces in case one breaks, gets lost, etc. It came with exactly the amount of pieces I needed… and with 3 extra red rods, for some reason.

Have to return it as some of the pieces are missing.