LEGO Boost Creative Toolbox 17101 Fun Robot Building Set and Educational Coding Kit for Kids, Award-Winning STEM Learning Toy (847 Pieces)

OVERALL CONCLUSION ================== LEGO boost is 80% of the learning at 50% of the cost and 20% of the hassle of LEGO’s fancier Mindstorms product. LEGO Boost compares really well to all other competing robots out there, so if you want your kid to know about coding, robotics, mechanics or technology, it’s a really easy choice. The age range is spot-on: 7 to 12 years old seems just right. TOP PROS: 1) Great value for what you get; 2) Extensive models for a lot of fun; 3) Painless setup so that kids can use the app and Bluetooth connection easily. TOP CONS: 1) Needs an iPad or Android tablet, which can triple the cost; 2) Limited accessories and other sensors/motors so far; 3) App can be very confusing at times and the “unlocking” of levels is irritating WHAT CAN LEGO BOOST DO? ====================== You can build 5 different, intricate projects right out of the box. LEGO included a huge assortment of great parts so that you can build a standing robot, a guitar, a “factory”, a cat, and a horizontal rover bot. Each model is part toy and part experiment because the app has included code that makes the characters lively and interactive while leaving room for customization. All the sounds and processing is done by your tablet, so that’s a smart way to save costs and make the “brain” brick really simple (which LEGO calls the “Move Hub”). The LEGO Boost app guides you through building and programming each robot in a set of challenges that are unlocked as you go. My 7-year-old and I could only figure out how to do Vernie the tall robot so far, which was sad because he wanted to start with the guitar or factory. This is minor bump in the road, though, because I envision this being a popular toy for a very long time. The fact that the Bluetooth setup was so painless (no pairing on iOS, it was like magic) makes this much easier to deal with than other robots like Cozmo. NOTE: If your app crashes, power off your iPad completely. This worked great for me. I’ve noticed that upon installation, some apps need a power cycle to work their best. I don’t know if this is a memory leak in the iPad or what. I’m running the app on a 3-year-old iPad Air 1 (not 2) and it works great. Anything newer should be fine, and LEGO has a device check section on their website. IS LEGO BOOST FUN AND EDUCATIONAL? ================================ For sure, this product is a ton of fun and teaches a lot about coding/logic, problem-solving, and creativity. My younger two kids, ages 4 and 7, are over-the-moon-excited about it and have been counting down the days until it arrived on August 1st. My 7-year-old already spent three hours building the first robot and he was completely enthralled. I was especially impressed by the robot’s head motion and the intricacy of the gears used in this model. The app has been fun to go through, but we’re only partially through it right now. HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO OTHER ROBOTS? ================================== As you can see from my website, LearnRichly, I’m kind of a learning toy nut. I especially like logic games and programming, so robotics coding is a pretty natural fit. In our house, we have Cozmo (from Anki), Dash (Wonder Workshop), Ozobot, and *3* LEGO Mindstorms kits (the older kids do FIRST Lego League, so they’ve acquired 2 EV3 sets and 1 NXT set). (Ouch, I just realized that I’ve spent over $1000 in toy robots in the last 5 years, yikes. We don’t eat-out or see shows more than a few time per year, so that helps save cash!) UPDATE: See more below about Cozmo in the 8/15 Update.. Which robot do we like the best? So far, LEGO Boost and Dash are the winners, with an edge towards LEGO if you have kids 8 and up and a recommendation for Dash if you have younger kids. Cozmo is small and limited, but more emotive and fun. He’s definitely a “toy” and the others are “learning toys.” Oddly, he’s also capable of real Python programming after a complicated SDK setup, so it’s an eclectic mix. Ozobots are only really useful for the most price-constrained budget; save up and buy a Boost, instead. Why are Dash and Boost the best? Because they give you real coding experience and make it fun. Dash has several apps available and is generally more mature as of right now, but I think Boost should catch up and exceed Dash overall. They both can take LEGO parts for building, but LEGO far and away exceeds Dash in versatility. It can be a factory, guitar, cat or who-knows-what-else that’s coming in the future! I do appreciate Dash as a standalone, start-from-scratch project, but LEGO will be the better choice for most households. Dash has been alone in this space for quite a while, but probably just got dethroned. UPDATE ON AUGUST 15th, 2017 ========================== OK, we've had LEGO Boost for 2 weeks now. We've built the standing robot, the guitar, and the mini-factory. We couldn't get the factory to work and must have done something wrong--we'll come back to it. My son wants to build the rover next. We also had to buy a large organizer set to keep all the pieces--what I didn't realize is how many *unique* pieces there are in this set. The Mindstorms kits have lots of pieces, but they are easier to organize since there are fewer than 100 unique ones. LEGO Boost has over 200 different types of pieces; we ended up using about 60 little divided bins in plastic craft organizers. If I had it to do over again I would buy the Akro Mills 64-drawer organizer like this one: Akro-Mils 64-drawer organizer . They charge too much for the drawer dividers, but I believe another company (stack-on?) has a 48-pack for much cheaper that *supposedly* works with the Akro Mills set, but I haven't verified. Since I wrote the above about Cozmo from Anki, I realize that he now has coding in the app! It's pretty good, too, so he's now much more competitive with LEGO Boost. I will review all of them in a future roundup at my little hobby blog LearnRichly.com, but for now I at least have an in-depth review of LEGO Boost that gives you much more detail than I could put in this Amazon review. Using my 6-criteria scoring scale, the average I came up with was a 4.4 out of 5 stars, so I wish Amazon would allow me to award LEGO Boost a 4.5 star rating instead of my 5 star rating.

LEGO Boost Creative Toolbox is pretty cool, there are multiple projects to build with the included pieces and then you can control them with the app! (Note- we use a Fire HD 8 Kids Edition Tablet, we were not able to use the app on the kid profile we set up, it needed to enable location service and the kid mode did not allow that, so we run it in the adult profile and I just turned on the parental controls) My 6 year old is able to build all of the projects and control them with minimal adult assistance. I thought he would need more assistance given that he is below the recommended age, but he able to build 98% of it without me and mostly just needs help finding pieces or taking the little ones apart. He did manage to break a piece, but now he knows to be more careful with the long connector pieces. We keep all the Boost pieces separate from our other LEGO in a plastic case with dividers that I used to use for jewelry. It is like 11x15x3 and all the pieces fit nicely inside! Now he is saving his money up for the Ninjago Stormbringer (70652) and LEGO City Arctic Scout Truck (60194) kits that have additional instructions within the Boost app to connect and control them! I'm sure there are lots of ways to incorporate other sets and pieces to build cool stuff as well.

Things started off quite well, with my 6 year old building the test robot with little assistance in about 45 mins. The test programming really began getting him interested in the kit. Will second another reviewer regarding documentation of the programming buttons, there isn't any. Lego, please send me that cheat sheet PDF as well. Then he started building Vernie. We did not have any of the app crashes so many people mentioned in their reviews, but then we're using the app on our basic Fire tablet, modified to use Google Play store apps. Midway through the build our tablet ran out of charge. Then started our struggle. After reloading the app, we slid through the instruction progress bar slider mistakenly until the end. At this point, the app assumes you've fully built Vernie and asks to connect. Vernie began talking, even though his feet and arms were incomplete. Not a very positive experience for a 6 year old. And there was no way we could go back to seeing the instructions again. There seems to be a "Reset Progress" button in settings, but we're afraid that will reset everything, including the test robot, test programming etc. Definitely don't want to go through all that again! Managed to search and find a PDF booklet of the instructions, but it has a ton of pages and not easy to skip several hundred pages to get to our page. Lego should've designed the app so that you could go a step back if needed. That said, I'd say Boost has definitely kept my 6 year old piqued and we're hoping to complete Vernie soon and will update this early review. Update (08/15/2017): We've finished Bernie (relying on the PDF instructions we unearthed via a Google search) and my 6-yr old is having a blast programming Vernie to do the various things he's capable of. Turning, talking and even responding to a handshake! I love how the programming language is just drag-and-drop. He's already learning the basic concepts of if-then and loops. I wish they included the programming cheat-sheet in the box, since icons on some of the programming blocks aren't at all obvious to an adult, let alone a kid. Upped my rating by another star purely for the programming being actually fun for a kid, and making a kid actually want to program more. Update (09/02/2017): Updating since there is a button that allows going back a step (as explained by Lego support in the comment), although it didn't work for some reason initially. I think you need to exit out of the building view and restart for the that button to work. But it did eventually and Lego support was good to point that out. Also, I'm running this on a Fire tablet which isn't officially supported by Lego, so I'll give them the benefit of doubt. Upping by another star, since there are very few flaws left at this point (biggest gripe is that pictures on some of the programming blocks aren't at all intuitive). So I'd like Lego to provide a cheat sheet of all the blocks used, either in the box or email it to customers. The bottom like is this is a fun kit which gives a lot for the money you spend and will help kids build logical thinking. What more could you want?

This has been a great Christmas purchase for my 7 year old daughter. Makes for lots of great father/daughter time and really does teach the fundamentals of programming. The only reason it's not a 5 out 5 rating is due to issues with the app on Android and Windows 10. Here are some of the app issues: - There is no user account to save your progress across the different platforms. - ran into issues with the app getting stuck at a step and never being able to get past it no matter how many times we rebooted the phone or uninstalled the app - lots of troubleshooting the app locking up on windows 10 as well. had to install it on another user account to get it working again. There is then no way to resume where you left off. You then spend the next 20 minutes going through every step of the robot builds again to get back to where you left off.

Bought this for my son for Christmas as it was on his list. I was hesitant to buy after reading reviews about problems with Bluetooth connectivity, battery and app issues. I took a chance on it because he wanted it so bad and my husband is very tech savvy. Right away we ran into a connectivity issue. My husband tried 2 older Android tablets, my new android tablet that I got for Christmas and two newer Android phones to no avail. He researched online for a couple of hours and finally found the problem and the solution on reddit. The hub had to be upgraded and this was done in about 2 minutes and it connected to my older tablet. We did not have app or battery issues, however, my son shut the hub off while building and turned it on when needed. I had seen a question on Amazon about how to shut the hub off and I wonder if that is the battery issue that some are having. It doesn't say to do this, or even how too, in the instructions. My son builds at least one lego set per week (yes I'm lego broke) so he easily finished it and was playing with it in about four hours (not including the connectivity issue) He did say that the instructions were easy to follow on the app and he was not booted out as some people are saying. He also did not have trouble with the tablet battery running out as some reviews are also saying. For us this was a great buy but I believe that lego dropped the ball on this one. There was never any mention of a hub upgrade on the app and this would be hard for anyone who is not tech savvy (like me) to do the research and actually know what to look for, not to mention doing the actual upgrade. I am sure this has caused quite a few disappointed kiddos and frustrated parents (including me until the issue was corrected) so I gave it four stars. The actual product deserves five stars for how much fun my son had building, coding and playing with it.

This has been the best present my son (6) has ever received! I love that you can make so many different robots with the same Legos. (So often the kits make one thing and then the pieces slowly get lost until you can’t recreate it...) We also bought the LEGO Boost book that goes with it for more ideas later. The only “surprise” we had was there is no instruction manual with the set. You HAVE to use the app to create the robots. So you must have an iPhone, iPad, or other compatible device available to build the robots. We ended up using an old iPhone that we had lying around, but a larger screen would probably be easier. I’m still giving it 5 stars because my 6 year-old is getting so many quality hours of play and probably already knows more about robotics than I ever will. :)

I know there are a lot of negative reviews for this, but my son adores it. He had no trouble building the robot and following the directions to make it do stuff. I had no trouble adding the free app to our Kindle. He's since torn it down determined to build the conveyor but hasn't stuck with it for a whole day like he did the robot. I think with all the options though this is going to be one that he plays with a lot on bad weather days. Edited 11/10/18 While my son and I still love the Boost and it is technically available on the Kindle, you can't use any of the Run functions from a Kindle child profile, even after a year's worth of updates. Because all child profiles on Kindle are still restricted, location services can not be turned on. No matter how old you make your child in the profile it will tell you that location services is not compatible with a child profile. Believe me I've tried. So while your child can follow the directions and build to their heart's content, they can not make their creation move until you log them into your own profile and turn locations services on in the adult profile. You can make an additional adult profile, but you will be required to have a separate Amazon account for that, which in my opinion completely defeats the purpose. While I would wholeheartedly recommend the Boost, use it with a compatible tablet other than the kindle, it's not worth the headaches. And I don't recommend the conveyor. The rest of the builds seem really great, and we're looking forward to trying the Boost with the new NINJAGO dragon that he just got. But the conveyor never seemed to work quite right no matter how many adjustments we made to it.

Our daughter is all about Legos and asked Santa for this kit. I was not expecting too much but was very surprised at how well thought out this kit is. You will need the Lego Boost APP to fully utilize the set. If using an Android device, it must be 5.0 or higher. Our Lenovo Tab 10 tablet was only 4.4 and would not load the app. So I downloaded the Microsoft version onto her Dell 2 in 1 laptop. It runs fine on it. Our 2 in 1 has Bluetooth which is how it communicates with the control block. I also loaded it on my Samsung Galaxy phone and it runs well on it. The Boost software takes you through the build for each of the five builds. You can also download each of the build instructions off the Lego site. But you must follow the app to unlock each level. It also gives you a step by step introduction to the actual code snippets. So it is best to follow along with the app. Our daughter is 9 and a skilled Lego builder. I worked with her given this is a very extensive build. If something gets missed along the way, it requires lots of tear down to correct. I would suggest going to the Lego site and watching some of the intro videos prior to starting the set. It will be useful. Also check out some of the YouTube videos. Besides the 5 items shown on the box, there are three more designs included in the app. Those are tucked away in another area in the app. You can see those in the Lego website videos. There are also some videos for out of the box ideas (color ball sorter for example). The kit has a color sensing photo eye. The kit is a bit more than I expected. While it may not be the more sophisticated Mindstorm Ev3 set, it is a very good starter set plus more. This kit will provide many hours of fun and learning. I would recommend it.