PRODUCT REVIEW
Lava Launch Coaster offers a great father/son project opportunity
By David Gewirtz
I've mentioned before just how patient my wife is. She has the patience of a saint. Married to me, she needs it. Over the years, Denise has grown relatively used to the strange things I bring home for work, the strange phone calls we get some weekend mornings from secretive agencies with 3-letter names, and even my ongoing (unsuccessful) attempts to grill the world's largest backyard hamburger.
But this time, when the boxes came in from K'NEX and I started building, I think she was a little concerned.
"Um, honey?"
"Yes, dear?"
"Uh, how...long... do you think that will be... I mean, I don't want to rush you, but, well, it's not moving in here forever, is it?"
It was the K'NEX Lava Launch Coaster. When constructed, it's 4 feet high and contains more than 20 feet of track.
Here's the K'NEX promotional video:
Their corporate video doesn't do this thing justice. So, I went poking around YouTube and came up with an excellent video by BBaller347, that does the coaster justice:
To be clear, that's not my living room. Denise isn't that patient. I just decided to use BBaller347's YouTube video because it really gives you a feel for the speed and size of this beast.
Although the documentation's not as clear as you'd get from a LEGO project, and some of the pieces are very small, there's no other way to categorize this thing other than a ton of good, clean, quality fun. We give the K'NEX Lava Launch Coaster a 5-out-of-5.
OUR RATING: 5 of 5
K'NEX also sent their Moto-Bots series. Compared to the $76 coaster, these $25 moving construction kits don't seem to have as much value. They're fun and relatively easy to build, and they do move, but they're not really robots (there's no computer interface, programmability, or remote control).
You can see the K'NEX promo video on YouTube:
We did like the ability to combine sets into a larger set, but since the instructions aren't as clear as you might like, it can get somewhat confusing.
Overall, we didn't find nearly as much value in the Moto-Bots as we did in the Lava Launch Coaster. We thought hard about whether we'd rate these as 3 (a solid product, but not exceptional) or a 4 (an exceptional product with a few minor flaws). And while we consider the Lava Launch Coaster exceptional and best-in-show, we found nothing particularly exceptional about the Moto-Bots.
OUR RATING: 3 of 5
One thing we liked about the Moto-Bots was that you did get a motorized toy you could build for about $25. If you're looking for a great father-son project, we enthusiastically recommend the Lava Launch Coaster. And if you're on a budget and want to build something with your kid that moves, the Moto-Bots are a good choice.
Oh, and for the record, the Lava Launcher only lived in our media room for a week before I took it down, packed it up, and returned it to the Computing Unplugged review lab warehouse. By the way, if you want to see some people with way too much free time on their hands, you should definitely search on "KNEX" in YouTube. There are some amazing projects!
Product availability and resources Learn more about K'NEX.
David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.
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