Elenco Line Tracking Robot Kit

I teach classes in Robotics and I have used this Line tracking robot kit. It has gears, motors, sensors, wheels and a circuit card. It is a great robot for beginners and fun.The shipping was great, arrived a week early.

I needed a squadron of small, inexpensive robots for a class i was teaching. These fit the bill nicely. Easy to assemble, no soldering and everything just plugs together. Two small motors drive the wheels and a single control board has the IR LEDs and sensors that point out the bottom to see a black line on any white surface .Put a track of electrical black tape on my desk and laughed as they chased each other round and round. Then the fun started: gave them to the class and challenged them to reprogram them with simple logic so they would AVOID black lines (instead of tracking them) and they became simple maze wanderers. Bent the LEDs/diodes at right angles and made them ignore the lines completely and chase each other insteadA great simple project for kids right out of the box, an interesting mind-challenge for older students with additional parts and an interesting desk toy when you're done with it

Had fun building this with my teenage daughter - took about 45 min. Robot tracks black tape on floor well - no so good with black marker on paper.For fun: When you're done building it, turn on the robot and look at the infrared LED's through a camera. The infrared's are the clear LED's on the bottom of the robot. Infrared light is not visible to the human eye so when you turn on the infrared LED's, they will still look like they are turned off - but camera lenses see them - so when you look on the camera screen you will see bright lights.

Surprised to see negative reviews of this. My son and I built it when he was five, and it gave him many, many hours of amusement, making tracks on the floor with electrical tape. Eventually, one of the wheels jammed, so it spun in a circle, as one of the other reviews described. I helped him take it apart, and he fixed the wheel and put it back together. I think this is an excellent toy on its own merits as well as being a good teaching tool for electronics and machinery.

My son likes it a lot. It takes concentration to build it, but once is done , it’s fun to play with. We used black electric tape on hardwood floor. My son made elaborate track for the robot to follow.

It is doing the job but it requires a very smooth surface and the black trail must have a certain width to work. Too wide or too narrow is not good.

I thought this would be just another junky, poorly designed kit chasing STEM dollars. Well, the kit blew me away. Yes it is made of inexpensive materials (hence low price) but the design is first class and as a now retired engineer I don’t often say that about designs. The directions were really good and kit easy to assemble. It is great that the directions included a circuit schematic but where the kit fails (and loses 1 star) is that like virtually all kits like this it doesn’t include “WHY” it works. There are 2 fully blank letter sized pages in the instructions that could easily have explained in simple language how/why the circuit works. It is a simple circuit and and explanation plus hints on some simple hacks like one reviewer mentioned would have made this an A+ kit.I bought this to put together with my very advanced (like 2-3 grade levels dependent on the subject) 5 year old grandson. After examining the kit and thinking it through I realized it to be a dumb idea. I’d say 7 yrs old is the earliest and 5th grade or older would be my recommendation though at this age you are on the cusp of a line following gizmo not being interesting. This is why the “why it works” information mentioned above is so important.

Son enjoyed putting it together but it only spins in one place on the black line. It doesn't matter if it's a black marker line on white paper or electrical tape. Cool idea just wish it worked :-(

It barely worked, and frustrated my son.