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

I bought this for my 13 year old Grandson. It arrived quickly. He normally uses Legos but wanted to try something different. He said the pieces are smaller and hurt his fingers to put it together. The directions were easy to follow. All in all he did enjoy the build and the finished product. He does not recommend this for younger than 12.

They love it in the school we used it for wizard off oz presentation

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.

Why did you pick this product vs others?:This is the flimsiest plastic to put together and cheaply made it does not come with all the tracks you see in the picture just walking by it tips it over and falls apart .

I got this for my 7 year old who loves building anything. The instructions were good and he only needed help with a few areas. It took about two sessions to build this set as there are many steps and lots of pieces. Like others have said, the actual rolled coaster gets stuck and does not have enough inertia to actually make the loop at the bottom. We had adjusted some pieces to make it work. It’s just not something you want to run into after working on building it for so long but we made it work.

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.

I purchased this product for my grandson's 8th birthday. He has enjoyed other K'NEX sets and I'm sure he'll love this one. The K'NEX Education STEM Explorations Roller Coaster Set is a thrilling way to dive into the world of engineering and physics. This set includes 546 colorful pieces and a motorized chain lift, and it can be used with other K'NEX sets. One set at a time and soon he'll have enough for the whole family to build with him.

One star off immediately because it is missing a part.These are maybe 50% the diameter of the knex from 30y ago. They bend easily and just don’t seem like they’ll last. My 30-35yo knex still seem stronger.I partially bought this assuming new knex would be compatible with legacy knex - not the case.I think that lack of rigidity is why it takes significant tinkering to get the car to reliably get back on the track to automatically be taken to the top of the coaster. This was a major issue for my mildly neurodivergent son that got extremely frustrated at times when it initially wouldn’t work on its own, and later when it would stop working. He eventually got through it, but in similar situations he’s written off the toy altogether such that it went in the donate pile.