Piper is truly amazing. My 9 and 11 year old daughters could not wait to set it up. Once we had it running they dove right in without fear. They love the game so navigating was seamless to them. Piper may seem intimidating to adults but trust me, it is not intimidating to your kids. They will love it.

My granddaughter learnt the pieces: motherboard, connectors, battery, screen. We talked about how computers worked (with the immense help of google for some terms and systems). That night, her face was glowing with excitement and pride. We spent the next several days 'playing' with it for an hour or so every day. Discovering what it could do or not. I was concerned that she would get bored as it is not a fancy colored machine, but it beat up any app and game she had for two reasons: she MADE it, and she felt she UNDERSTOOD it.

This is an incredibly teaching tool and platform, cleverly disguised as a children's toy. There's a ton of educational products on the marketing trying to get kids interested in STEM - things like Snap Circuits, Goldieblox, LittleBits, Lego Mindstorms, even code.org. The problem is that they are good at the science, but aren't actually "fun". They're great, but they're really just an incremental step over other building blocks like Legos. Piper gives you the building blocks, captures the fun and power behind Minecraft, and then adds a whole engaging in-game story mode on top of that to give kids a REASON to use the building blocks. My 7 year old was building real physical circuits right out of the box, the same kind of circuits that I didn't see until I was in engineering school! Incredible. Head and shoulders above and several generations ahead anything else on the market right now.