The Official Starter Kit Deluxe Bundle with Make: Getting Started The Open Source Electronics Prototyping Platform 3rd Edition Book

We love this kit! It has so many parts! I bought this for my children and it has proven to be an awesome investment. I think this is a wonderful introduction to kids who are interested in electronics and coding. My kids tried to do projects without the book, however, and I feel the book is necessary for starters. I'm just so impressed that this generation has access to this type of thing and it is packaged and bundled quite nicely...very organized. You do not have to be an advanced science student to learn from it or enjoy it. But, I understand you can adapt it to more advanced projects for engineering and whatnot. We are now looking to buy a bigger board for larger projects. But, the small board works just fine.

Excellent kit

It's a great way to learn about circuits and electricity. It came with everything mentioned and was neatly packed into the box. The project book explains things very clearly and I recommend doing them. As simple as they seem you learn some important techniques that are needed later on. I couldn't believe how small it was. Sometimes I find it hard to place all of the wires because the breadboard is small too. I will have to spring for the bigger size to do more complicated projects. (I added pics so you can see just how small). Another downside was the difficulties in getting the program to work. I'm pretty sure this is a common problem because I see it posted on all kinds of forums. I couldn't get the program to run once it downloaded (couldn't upload sketches to the arduino board from my comp). It would say "the system could not find the file specified" It took me a couple hours to figure out!! You have to go into the device manager and update driver. Not something you should have to do manually. This is a great hands on learning tool good for even younger kids. I would say an 8 year old could start doing this if they're interested in this type of stuff. It's just the programming that is somewhat hard to pick up on. It's not complicated, but I'll have to wait for vacation before I put too much effort into learning that.

To me, this is the perfect kit for anyone with any interest in electronics to find out if this is something they'd like to pursue. If this was available when I was in high school, I'd have followed a different career path. Using only the parts in this kit, the project book that came it, and freely available software on the Internet (all referenced in the book), I was able to quickly create a little three button "dimmable" LED bulb and a Windows GUI that can control and respond to it. Home Automation Proof-of-Concept successful. I'm on to adding wireless, sensors, music... I guess that should serve as a warning to parents: if your child takes to this, there will be an endless string of requests for more and more small parts. Individually, all these parts are very inexpensive, but... There's always the hope you're raising the next Ben Franklin. Have fun, I sure am!

Its an Arduino with some basic parts & pieces, start here before you go wild and investing too much to see if its for you. There are other comparable kits but this has project books so I don't have anything to compare to.

Loving this kit, only thing if I was to do it again I would buy the board and what I wanted individually aka more sensors, another bread board, the sensor kit, I also bought the Makes book on Arduino programming, This was my first step into Arduino major computer background very minimal on the programming end, My first project was getting this TFT to work http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UAA2XIC?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00 after about 3 hours a bit of swearing and wondering why......things fell into place, the TFT is working and I can carry on with other projects

Only half way through the projects in the book; I'm doing this with my teen, who has ZERO experience with prototyping electronics - We are loving the flexibility on the Arduino platform. So many projects, so little time :)

I bought this as a gift for someone who is in school for electronics. It has been a fun and also learning experience for him.