The Solar Car Book product reviews

I have always enjoyed building things, and it seems my young son has inherited the constructor bug with a vengence. After building sitting down and building some lego Bionicles together, and then some K'Nex models all on his own, I thought it would be interesting to see how he coped with this... it says "Ages 8+" but he's pretty smart for a 7 year old (if I do say so my proud-daddy self ).

Since it requires the brief use of a sharp knife, firstly to separate the body plate from the book, and then to chop one of the 2 supplied straws (the other is a spare, just in case...) into small spacer pieces, I did those for him. No point in needlessly risking his skin's integrity.

After that, it was a case of fairly simply step-by-step assembly. He plowed into it with great glee, and dexterity, and in a matter of a few minutes has assembled the car quite successfully. I tidied it up a bit after he had finished, by rerouting the wires through the surplus holes in the card-body, so they didn't catch on anything, and then we tok it outside for a test drive.

Unfortunately, being the height of winter here in NZ, the sun is weak, and was quite low in the sky by 3:30pm... so while the car was sitting flat it wasn't getting even close to enough solar rays to run it. The only way we could get the drive-wheel to spin was to pick it up and aim's it's cell directly at the sun. This at least proved that it worked, and worked well.

Overall, I would say that a clever 6 year old would be able to do this easily, the instructions are so clear and easy to follow. A small amount of preparation help from an adult, and they shouldn't have any serious issues at all. Possibly a little expensive at first glance, you need to consider that solar cells aren't cheap... and the cheap ones are usually utterly useless... so you can't just pinch one out of a garden light you picked up from The Warehouse.