Become an Kid Engineer with Gravity Bugs

What is a Gravity Bug? It is a "bug" that uses suction cups to move and can walk up smooth surfaces and on smooth surfaces. We tried the Solar Bots last year from Thames and Kosmos. They also came out with the Gravity Bug. It is a kit of parts that can be assembled to make a moving bug.
This blog post contains affiliate links. I was provided the Gravity Bug in exchange for an honest review.
Here are all the parts that are used to make the walking gravity bug. In the instructions it says not to cut them all out at the same time, but we ended up doing that. It was not a big deal for us, because we could easily figure out what parts were what based on the pictures.
My son started with pliers, but we also used Cricut scissors because those could cut out the burs on the parts. It is extremely important to cut out the burrs otherwise the bug will not work.

Here are all the parts.

We followed the instructions to make the bug. My son is 8 the age recommended for the Gravity Bug.

Putting the gears together was a complicated process and they needed to touch one another just right. The pictures were pretty good at showing which parts went where. We did end up separating one of the wires from the leads when we were trying to bend the metal it was attached to back as the instructions said. Luckily we had some electrical tape and taped it back together and it worked.

Here is our completed gravity bug. It took us a few tries putting it together and I had to help quite a bit, but it eventually work for a while.

What did we think?
This is a hard question for me. It was fun to put together, but the age range should probably be more for teenagers because it was a little complicated to put together and I ended up doing a lot of "helping". Maybe they could make a version that is a little easier to assemble for 8 year olds. Maybe the parts could be burr free when in the package? Other than that it was a lot of fun to make with my son.


Here is the packaging information. 

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