My daughter Emma spotted ARCKIT
sets in an educational catalog a few months back and immediately added them to her wishlist, so when the opportunity arrived to review this product she was thrilled! ARCKIT is designed for kids aged 12 and up, so at not-quite-10 Emma was pretty young to be building with it but her enthusiasm helped make up the difference. ARCKIT is a STEAM tool that teaches kids about engineering while they demonstrate their artistic side.
ARCKIT Review
ARCKIT
was designed by professional architects, and it is based off of an award-winning design that was originally designed for professional use. Unlike most model building sets, ARCKIT pieces connect without glue, so you can use them over again. Like many other model-building kits, the ARCKIT requires excellent fine motor skills and an attention to detail.
The ARCKIT is primarily designed so that you build whatever you like, but the kit we were sent (ARCKIT A60) did include instructions to build one home. We found the instructions somewhat frustrating, because they didn’t clearly show which pieces you needed to use where. This meant that we had a few false starts where we used pieces on the lower level of the house that we later realized we needed for the top floor. The instructions also skip steps and assume a pretty solid familiarity with the kit. The illustrations make pieces look flat when then they aren’t. For example, the six-panel roof in the photo above is shown in the instructions as a single piece.
Mike, Emma, and I all worked together, and eventually we did make the house that came with the instructions. It was pretty fiddly, and the exercise definitely reinforced the importance of supporting beams and weight bearing walls in architecture!
I think that the ARCKIT sets are great educational tools for kids aged 12 and older – or younger kids who have a lot of patience, good fine motor skills, and strong interest in architecture. All three of my oldest kids – nine-year-old Emma, seven-year-old Johnny, and six-year-old Lily – find this set interesting. They play around with it quite frequently, and I think they will be able to build some sophisticated structures as they grow older. If we had a 3D printer (wouldn’t that be awesome?), we could use SketchUp 3D modeling software to design and print off original creations that integrate into the system, making the sky the limit in terms of creative building with these sets!
Do you have a budding architect in your home?
MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.
My son loved this kit too but he’s older at newly 11. He’s used to doing following the booklet instructions for LEGO kits so that part was ok, but assembling some of the pieces that were inside the house required fine motor coordination that sometimes had him frustrated.
Still, he liked following the instructions and built one floor to spec and then he went free form which was even more fun for him. I think that part works for kids who are younger as well. The pieces don’t snap together; they press together so LEGO users need to adjust to that but I think it’s a fun kit for budding architects.
What an interesting kit! I’m excited to hear that the scale building reinforces important architectural concepts like load-bearing walls.
That looks like fun! So great she had her eye on that and then you got to review it!
It certainly sounds very intriguing, but, I am afraid, my 9 year old daughter lacks both fine motor skills and patience for that. I just noticed that Emma has braces too! Welcome to the club :)
Yep, she got them this fall. Round one of what will be at least a two-round project. Poor girl got my small jaw with Mike’s not-small teeth.
What an interesting kit. So if it doesn’t connect with glue, how does it connect. I’m really curious now.
The pieces plug into each other.