He loves electronics and building models and was ready to try a robot of some sort. When finished he taped a black line on a large piece of white paper and the mouse followed the trail!
This mouse requires some soldering and lots of following instructions. It was a great way for my son to sit and carefully read through the instructions and then back track when something wasn't working, to finally have a completed and working robotic mouse.
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My 8-year-old daughter worked with her dad to put this together. Once you put it together the mouse will follow a black line on the floor. We've found that it has to be a pretty thick line, so we use cardboard and electrical tape. It might work fine on a wood floor with the tape, but we have tile and the grout lines get in the way. This is a big hit with all the kids' friends at home and when she's showed it off at school.Best Deals for Elenco Line Tracking Mouse
This was a good project to do with my 9-year-old grandson, with him reading the instructions, getting the pieces, and telling me what to solder where. He learned about the resistor color code, and about capacitor units. Earlier he had already assembled the similar (but pre-wired) 21-890 line-tracking robot, and we therefore already had laid out a course for it to follow. The trace should be black tape of at least 3/4" width, without sharp corners, on a large white paper or posterboard background; right-angle crossings as in a figure-8 track work fine.I soldered it with an Elenco SL-5 40-W soldering station, which worked well, but would be far too difficult and dangerous for my grandson, because the long iron tip is not shielded, and the holder for the soldering iron on the soldering station is clamped rather than scewed in, and came loose far too easily. I do not recommend this unit for small hands, and in fact burned myself on it twice during the project.
It took some looking around to find the proper instructions in the instruction manual for all the electrical pieces, because the necessary information (such as color code for resistors, and polarity for capacitors) was scattered over several places, but the completed unit worked flawlessly on its first try. The transparent top shaped like a mouse is neat. If you can do the soldering for your youngster, and (s)he can feel in charge by guiding you, this is a nice project to do together. If (s)he is old enough to solder, more information in the manual about the computer inputs and on how that computer makes its decisions would be useful; now that computer is a black box.
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I purchased this to do a summer project with my 11 year old son. The instructions are well laid out and the soldering is a fun project for someone his age. It was a good afternoon project. Definitely worth the price. You will need a good soldering iron with a small tip or otherwise be spending some time desoldering :).Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Elenco Line Tracking Mouse
Bought for an 11 yr old for school project on robots. Very difficult to assemble. Had to solder all electronic pieces on 2 circuit boards. Very time consuming and hard for an 11 yr old. After nearly 2 days of assembly the thing ran,but started smoking and became hot enough to almost melt battery holder. Never did get it to follow any lines. Would not recommend unless you are an electronics specialist.
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