Science Reviews

I'm here to find replacement parts for this toy. My daughter was working really hard to try to make something work on this, and right when she got it together, one of the wires attached to the light broke off, when she tried to put it into the coil to make the connection.

We can't solder it back in, there are no replacement parts and my daughter is crying at the kitchen table and we don't want to order another one, just to make her happy.

Seriously, this toy is a piece of crap.

I gave the toy high marks for educational value, because it teaches kids an important lesson. Once corporations have your money, they don't care about whether or not you actually were able to use it, or have fun, or will need replacement parts, they only want to get MORE money off you, somehow.

Also, buyer beware is an important lesson.

I purchased the Electrolab and what I considered a more traditional electronics kit for my son for Christmas. I had thought that the self contained projects were a very good idea.

I have only had the patience to do one project with my son. We chose the radio as I had made similar diode based sets when I was about 10 and my son was most interested in that item.

Bottom line the kit is very difficult and does not have good instructions. Biggest complaint was the need to roll your own coil. That process took nearly an hour, had no explanation of why you would want to do this, why a coil is necessary and could not have easily been done by anyone under the age of 13 or 14 unless they were very patient and mechanically inclined. Additionally the frame for the radio was very poorly made plastic that had no instructions on how to fold it correctly for assembly. Many small parts, many manual tasks. The kit was more an exercise in mechanical assembly than electronics.

On the positive side I believe it is a fairly accurate representation of what early amatuer dabblers in crystal radios needed to go through to create a receiver. It was kind of nifty for me but the learning value and difficulty makes hard to recommend for even older (adolescent and up) children.