Gears! Gears! Gears! reviewed: Do all these gears pack a STEM punch?

Dash Robot review: Will it teach your kids math + coding?
July 3, 2017
Are Skoolzy Straw Structures a good STEM toy?
September 1, 2017
0

It's all about Gears! Gears!, and, oh yes, some more Gears!

Today's review is one of the massive Gears! Gears! Gears! set, from the Learning Resource. It has won a lot of awards, as a particularly popular STEM-oriented toys.

It's a huge set of interlocking gears, for your little ones to craft into huge, interactive, moving creations. What's the STEM payoff? The company promotes Gears! Gears! Gears! as an educational prep for fine motor skills, engineering skills, reasoning, hand-eye coordination, and creative muscles.

We are a fan of the toy -- and we recommend it to all the parents out there who want their kids to play in an open, imaginative way. All those Gears! Gears! Gears! foster kids' imagination, creativity, and construction ability -- as well as being a great toy for adults and kids to team up with. It provides opportunities to experiment with simple mechanics and science, and has the creations come alive with all of the moving parts.

Overall we recommend the Gears! Gears! Gears! Super Building Set for parents of 4 year olds and up. Most likely, kids older than 5 or 6 will learn the most about cause and effect, and how to iterate on better constructions. That said, it's still a beloved toy for older toddlers (and even crawling babies, who love to play and watch spinning the gears).

Buy a Learning Resources Gears! Gears! Gears! Super Building Set for your little one

Check out Learning Resources Gears! Gears! Gears! Super Building Set, 150 Pieces on Amazon. If you purchase it via this link, we may earn a commission. It helps support our site!

What's actually involved with all these Gears!?

The Super Building Set is a huge set of gears, all of which are the same size, that you can link up together to create giant spinning constructions

This set has 150 pieces included, with 66 gears in six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Then there are the things to make all the gears work together: 8 pillar connectors, 36 square pillars, 8 interlocking bases, 31 six-way axles, 2 crank handles, plastic storage tub, and an Activity Guide if you need a little inspiration.

We were looking forward to this abundance of Gears! Gears! Gears! and all their support, in order to allow lots of play and surprise. Our goal was to get our kids to experiment -- trying out weird and random ways to assemble all the gears, and see how their unique creation worked together.

Also, we were hoping that Gears! Gears! Gears! would provide few other STEM lessons: sorting, grouping, and counting the Gears (for the younger kids) and then the more creative engineering working -- designing, constructing, and putting physics into play with all these gloriously spinning gears moving together (especially for the older kids).

Our verdict?

The toy is fun and lively, and great for experiments. We were ambitious and tried with our 2 year old -- but we've concluded the real educational STEM value is only for 4 and up. Little toddlers like watching the Gears! orchestra -- all of them moving -- but they are not as good at the experimentation and planning.

As a parent, it is fun to get a long chain of gears going and watching them all spin together -- but that doesn't quite hold 3 and younger kids' attention for very long time. Watching older kids play with it, though, it seems much more effective.

We don't think this toy necessarily has the longest lifecycle -- kids won't play with it endlessly, but it's fun for an every-once-in-a-while gears extravaganza. For its relatively affordable price tag ($39.64 as of this writing), that could be okay -- depending on your willingness to allow more multi-piece toys into your house.

The Rundown

Overall score: 7/10

Pros

  • This will increase fine motor skills for most kids. Connecting and disconnecting the gears will get them working on their hand-eye coordination. The gears aren't too burdensome to connect and rearrange.
  • For kids older than 4 years old, they will likely be able to get STEM lessons of creativity, construction, and iteration.
  • The colored pieces are organized into color-coded categories for each piece. These can reinforce categorization skills for the littler ones -- emphasize this as a parent as you play with them.
  • Even for kids younger than 3, there's a lot of joy to be had. They try to figure out what the gear constructions are doing, and like it's general character -- motion, synchronicity, and surprises.
  • As a parent, it's fun to play with it with our kids. And we can use the pieces to help narrate to the older ones about what is happening. We can tell some STEM stories, emphasizing the planning, the trying-out, and the if-then conditionals at work.
  • The resource set lives up to its name: 150 pieces provide enough gears for kids to make a lot of different builds.
  • We've heard from other parents that these gear sets are an especially good fit for kids with autism or sensory sensitivities. They can be useful in increasing their fine motor skills
  • The price point, of under $40, is good -- making the toy worth taking a risk on.

Cons

  • The fade-away factor is real. It may be fun the first time, but it can be hard to get a long, sustained life span of play.
  • We found that with this toy, for the STEM education to really be present, parents need to be pretty actively involved during playtime. Kids should be with their parents to understand the if-then computational thinking, and to encourage experiments, building towards a goal, and meeting challenges. Only then does the toy hold kids attention for longer, and convey more learning. Parents should help kids by guiding their learning and thinking and supporting them to try for themselves.
  • Little ones will be attracted to the toy, but it's not very educational for them. Between ages 1-3, they might not fully understand how it works. They likely won't get the STEM computational thinking lessons. It can still be a fun gear toy for them.
  • It is easy to take the pieces apart and snap them back together. However, the green and purple pieces, which make up the framework, attach so tightly so that it is hard for a 4 year old and younger kids to put together and take pieces apart. This can lead to annoyances, whining, and other unhappy moments.
  • At the very start, for kids who haven't otherwise played with gears, there is some amount of onboarding. Parents need to introduce what gears are. Otherwise, kids still won't really know the purpose of gears, or what the payoff is.
  • There are so many pieces with moveable plastic parts. This can be a headache for parents who are already surrounded in clutter -- no more too-many-pieces toys! It can also prove a little frustrating for littler kids, if they can't manipulate them easily.