Dopers, if you visited and didn’t see any boxes you liked, take another look, we’ve added some new options, small kits and big kits that may suit you better.
grayhairedmomma, there are already a number of companies that do monthly services, we’re purposefully going a different direction, and likely won’t go the subscription route in the future. I know of Kiwi Crate, STEM Box and Steve Spangler as people who do subscriptions. Personally, I feel that the model is very costly, a lot of packaging and shipping is necessary, we’re going more for usability in group activities (like a birthday party) that require a low cost per kit.
We are VERY serious about the experiments working as designed. We’ve had too much trouble with other kits that appear like they should work, but need fine tuning to make it happen.
With a focus on group activity, we’ve tried to condense each experiment into a single primary concept that can be repeated and adjusted, rather than 3-5 different experiments using many of the same parts. We’ve also re-designed each experiment multiple times to make sure it works.
Any experiments that remain a bit fiddly, we’re going to offer simpler versions as an option. Like using tablets instead of powdered chemicals, or a kit including only one design of paper airplane, so they can try the same design 4 times instead of getting 4 different designs to be frustrated over.
In our booklets, we’re generally setting aside 3 pages for instructions and follow-on exploration, 1 page for science history and 2 pages for science education. If we manage to get everything in using less space than that, we would throw in a game, word search, connect the dots, etc.
