Thames & Kosmos My Robotic Pet: Coding Chameleon STEM Building & Experiment Kit | Color-Sensing Coding Robot for Boys & Girls Ages 8+, Screen-Free Educational Fun, Robotic Reptile with 3 Play Modes

Stim activity
Cool toy

Long build but cool STEM project
This kit is a fun STEM project, but definitely not a solo build for kids. It ended up being more of an adult build with kids watching and sort of helping. There are a ton of tiny parts, wires, screws, etc., that can get complicated in a hurry. The book that comes with it tries to be depict it as best as possible but it can get confusing at points. Never used the video walk through and only used the book. Once finished, the chameleon looks great and has some fun features—color-changing belly, tongue movement, and simple coding cards. The coding isn’t super advanced and can be a little glitchy, but my kids still think it’s awesome. Price point is so-so and I would not leave this in the hands of a kid who is tough on toys as it may not hold up. Overall, a very challenging but rewarding project best for older kids with adult help.

Mixed feelings about this simple toy and chore
I have mixed feelings about this toy.First: the level of assembly required was much higher than seems appropriate for a toy. The pieces can’t be reused in new toys, so it’s not like a building block set. You snap the plastic pieces off of a series of mold frames, sand them a bit, and attach them with screws. It’s a very intricate toy with many very small parts, wire pathing, and super tiny screws, and it takes hours to assemble, across dozens of pages of instructions. The notion an 8 year old child is going to do this is amusing, but of course parental involvement is expected.The toy is larger than expected at around the size of an adult’s foot (the manual says 15 inches, but some of that is the tail). Once assembled, your chameleon is nicely detailed. About a fifth of the chameleon is part of the tummy area, which is white, and has a light inside that will match cards or other stimulus. This isn’t really camouflage, and the toy doesn’t blend in with anything, but it kinda matches things around it, which my kids did find very entertaining. Put the lizard on a blue counter, and the stomach area shows a blue light.You also have cards with other instructions for the lizard, which is a car on four wheels, to roll around, rotate around, go backwards, etc. You can give it a series of these instructions and it should go through them, but we had trouble getting it to work reliably. At any rate, notice that it’s not like the lizard walks around, jumps, or has any robotic features like that. It’s a car with plastic (dead and unmotorized) limbs sticking out that only articulate when pushed around. It does have a ‘tongue’ spear thing too.The toy is not very durable, and I worry that with assembly being difficult, fixing it would also be an inevitable problem. Losing a screw or a leg probably won’t change the robot too much. I don’t know what the educational value is here. I get that lizards can change color to camouflage, but this is merely a tribute to that activity. It’s nothing like how that process works in nature. I suppose if the adult does the assembly, and later a kid gets to play, that is fun for them, but that’s no different from buying a working toy off the shelf. There is essentially no educational value to the assembly or even the ‘coding’ process (given the low reliability of that process and the extremely simple ‘robot’).I don’t mind toys where assembly is part of the fun, buy this is more of assembly to skip the manufacturing cost because running the wires through the intricate body is a very precise task. I also think this toy, fully assembled would be worth a small fraction of the list price, and be much more fun.I do not see the value here, but it’s a large lizard that does most of what it’s advertised.

Cheap parts and overly complicated assembly
The parts are in plastic sheets so you have to shave off the little nubbins that remain. Even with doing that, I spent all day putting this together with my son. Hours! Gears are still not catching. To go back inside the front gearbox to fix it is going to be a nightmare.At first, I gave three stars. And brought it down to two and then the one when this has become increasingly difficult to fix it. We are returning it. Wasted almost the whole day and upset my kid.