GraviTrax Starter Set

This stayed tucked away until we were about 3/4 of the way done with our school year. After I pulled it out, I realized how much we could have and should have been using it throughout the year. My 8 year old engineer minded girl LOVES choosing the most challenging mazes to build while my creative 6 year old loves building her own mazes. Honestly, I even enjoy following the directions and building structures myself! The quality is wonderful. My only complaint is that the base is made out of cardboard and you have to punch out the holes. I don't know if we're supposed to keep the punched out pieces, or what they're for? Either way, I look forward to incorporating this into next year as well since it was a family favorite for us!

This track set up is very fun and great for a 1st-3rd grade level. However, there are some kinks in the design. For example, Some of the magnetic pieces are to strong so the marbles fly off of the tracks. I won't be buying any more from this brand because we teach so much physics that it bothers us how it is designed. However, if you are getting it to help your child learn hand dexterity or learning to construct things and fallow instructions then it is wonderful. The kinks are minor so don't let you detour you unless you are an engineer like my husband is.

My 8 year-old son has spent hours every week playing with his Gravitrax set. This is a kid who rarely plays with toys in the manner in which they are intended. Amazingly, he has worked his way through all of the tracks in the manual (which slowly introduces you to all the pieces in the set) and now loves to make his own courses. He always feels proud about what he has created. We also bought the accessory kit to keep the joy going, and he is thrilled! He loves rearranging the pieces to find ways to make the ball bounce even higher on the 2 Trampoline pieces, and playing with the "Catapult" piece. If Timberdoodle offered even more add-on sets, we would buy them!

We bought this for my seven year old for Christmas. He LOVES it. He’s able to accomplish a lot on his own and has spent hours and hours designing new tracks. Several other family members also love it, from siblings to grandparents.

I got this set to use as a lab activity with my son's physics curriculum. Since there are two build options, we will use one as instructive/demo and one as sort of a lab test, if you will. I am sure my son will love this sort of test over a pencil/paper one. It will be so fun to have hands-on visuals to define concepts and vocab. I can't wait until we start! The only reason I gave it 4 star instead of 5 is because I do wish it had even numbers of all the components because we do like to do side-by-side comparisons to see how changing one thing will impact the result. I feel like that is essential to developing a scientific discoverer. However, one big bonus with this set that differentiates it from other marble run products is the open-ended directions in one of the builds. The students have to put what they learned and discussed from from the first build to use in order to complete the second project. It takes this set up from "toy" to science kit, in my mind.