Thinkfun - Gravity Maze - Falling Marble Brain Game and Stem Toy for Kids Age 8 Years And Up

Product Information

Figuring out how to place the structures and dropping in the marble to see if you were correct is surprisingly intellectually stimulating and even a little thrilling. We’ve packed them in our car and taken them to visit with grandparents, and we’ve had kids over for playdates to try them out. And some have extra lines on them indicating horizontal (rather than vertical) placement will be involved. Many additional pieces can be attached to the cubes to create stunts for the marbles to perform on their way down. For kids of children’s generation the equivalent was an electric train set that one could set up and operate in different ways.

If you are anything like me, it won’t take long before you start building your own mazes from scratch. We quickly discovered that this was deafeningly loud on a wooden table, yet the structures are usually too unstable to stand well on carpet. This limits where you can build (unless you purchase an additional starter pack to increase your grid space) but gives the system exceptional stability. For those seeking both a challenging and entertaining single player game, Gravity Maze is certainly worth consideration. For this purpose, we transfer to our partners your data which is necessary for the use of our offers.The colourful gravity maze is a great way to get children working together and using their logical thinking skills to guide the marble out of the maze. The pieces only fit together one way which can be very awkward when trying to use the stunt sections because they always seemed to need to be attached backward to the way we were building. My 5 year old grandson is able to play with it and enjoy it without help–once he has some assistance in setting it up. Sure, the fun factor will keep your child engaged for hours, but at the same time they will be improving their problem solving skills and increasing their spatial reasoning. When we got the sequence correct, we found the marble flowed down from starting tower into the destination tower pretty smoothly.

However, it is equally enjoyable for siblings to tackle a puzzle together or for a parent to guide their child through tough maze structure placements. Develops visual processing, visual discrimination and visual processing skills (vital skills to learn to read).Although GraviTrax has a significantly higher entry cost, it is worth every penny of that and it comes highly recommended. Often, figuring out something on their own is the most rewarding part of learning for a child and Gravity Maze offers a tangible hands-on method of experimenting with cause and effect that also offers a sense of accomplishment. Because of COVID-19, supply chains have been disrupted across all product categories, including toys. The smaller expansions are single stunt pieces including a loop, hammer, catapult, and additional cannon.

Like all of ThinkFun’s games, Gravity Maze has an educational aspect – it’s built to develop critical thinking skills and tie into STEM subjects like science and engineering. While setting up Mouse Trap was certainly fun, there was really only one way to do it and the charm wore off fairly quick. If I had to criticise the system, it would be that there were times where we built a tower and found that one piece of track was just too long to connect two curves, while the next size down was just too short. GraviTrax Starter Set Contents (NB, around half the height tiles are missing from this image), Image: Sophie Brown Q-Ba-Maze 2. The idea is to aim them into another piece such as the vortex, but this isn’t always easy or possible to achieve.Setting up the game or cleaning it up after playing, is easy and quick; everything fits nicely in the box. The GraviTrax system uses plastic curves connected by thin rails which are raised by towers created from stacks of other pieces. The components are top notch, with the tower parts being entirely made of plastic; the same goes for the game board itself.

The kits only come with the most basic instructions so it’s down to you to figure out how to put things together, and stunt pieces like the Pivot Trampoline in the Bounce Stunt Set are totally random with where they send marbles so you will often end up picking them up from the floor/under the sofa/etc. The narrow cube bases mean that the system can be unstable if built too high without considerable attention being paid to the base.There’s also a grey 3D grid, 10 x 3D coloured towers of varying heights, and 3 x stainless steel marbles. Given the need for gravity, the marble won’t travel far in parallel, but it is still an essential element of some builds. Should you complete all the challenges, or you want to freestyle, you can also let your imagination run wild and build your own designs. Playing through the increasingly difficult brain teaser style challenges will sharpen your mind by improving logical reasoning, spatial reasoning and planning skills, all through fun gameplay. The replayability in Gravity Maze will depend in part on how good you are at mapping and remembering sequences.