My son is a huge Harry Potter fan and is also interested in coding. The instructions are basically non-existent and like everything you download an app and connect with Bluetooth to the iPad. It worked right away, but it took awhile to figure things out. The instructions need to be better. The age range is 6+ and that is about right but I wouldn't recommend this for younger than 6 or your 6 year old that is on the lower end of the advanced scale. The actual program is fun and teaches your child how to begin coding, what it is, how it works and once you do commands what can occur. This type of relationship will be a great base moving forward. It's Harry Potter-centric of course which can encourage your kids to play with it. At $80 it's a solid value, but at $100 perhaps a bit much. Make sure you have an afternoon to be able to spend to figure things out and time and patience to work on this and the kinks. Will indeed do it's job helping your kids code!

This KANO HARRY POTTER CODING KIT works as advertised. It requires an app (Win10, FireOS, Android, iOS) for operation and play. (The Kano Code app for the iPad seems to work well.) The wand is fairly large--big enough to look and feel like a real magic wand. The kit includes a booklet with instructions for assembling the wand. You insert batteries into a circuit board, put a button piece and the circuit board into a part of the wand, and close the wand with another piece. Adding the last wand piece is a bit tricky, but the finished wand looks nice and doesn’t fall apart. A button on the end of the wand opens it up for battery changes. Two sets of batteries are included. The app allows a child to create a Kano account, but sends an email to a parent’s email address to allow the parent to set the child’s privileges. The app opens to an illustrated map of the Hogwarts campus. The map has colored spots that you tap or select to open the “challenges”. For example, an early challenge teaches the child to change the colors on a drawing of an owl. The coding is accomplished by dragging and dropping code blocks until they click together and add the color-changing capability to the wand. As an adult who knows almost nothing about coding, I didn’t fully understand how the coding blocks went together or how the wand was supposed to be used once a new coding feature was added. With a little more study time, I’m sure that I would have figured out how to do the coding. However, if the wand is intended for a very young child, an adult with minimal coding knowledge will probably be required to help the child get started. The coding kit also includes a nice chart of the wand motions required to execute the spells used in the Harry Potter books and movies. This kit should keep a child busy for hours, if the child is motivated to learn to use the wand.

This is an interesting device. You need a tablet in order to use this, as the wand itself will do nothing. I am using it with the iPad and it has been interesting to say the least. I do not have any programming skills so everything I am doing is new to me. It looks so simple from watching the videos, but when you actually start to do some of the coding, it is confusing, and tricky. It definitely takes some practice. I was hoping I could pick this u, teach myself and then teach my toddlers. Unless you have experience with coding somewhat, you will be a fish out of water like me. It is fun though and exciting to learn new things. The wand is a Bluetooth device and built extremely well. It comes with batteries, and detailed instructions. You are supposed to assemble it step by step with your child. It comes in a very nice packaging, and the wand is large enough to be used by adults, and kids. So far we have been experimenting with it, and learning as we go. I can't say we are having a blast because it is just confusing at times, but like anything, I am sure once we get the hang of it it'll be like riding a bike. If you have little ones who are into programming, or interested in wanting to learn yourself, I would pick this up.

So this is a neat little twist on the many Scratch programming systems out there: the wand is a cool idea that is nicely integrated into the whole concept. Good job! The wand is a tiny little bit primitive: in particular, there's no on/off switch, so you have to remove the battery each time, which honestly was rather difficult to do the first time. It's not very fancy, but the simple plastic stick does the job it's supposed to do. (I hope that Kano sells accessories so that we can buy upgraded/customized wands at some point!) The real issue is the app. The nice thing is that this is something easy to fix, but there were times that my son couldn't figure out how to finish the challenge... even after he had completed it. Maybe as he gets more used to everything, it will become less frustrating, but these first impressions are critical. I want to see if he ever picks this up again! I very much hope he does.

My 9-year-old daughter is having a great time coding all sorts of different actions with her Kano Harry Potter Coding Kit. The app brings in all sorts of other elements, so it feels like there's an unlimited number of animated actions that can be coded. The app has clicked off and erased her work a couple times before she could save it, and that hopefully will be fixed with a future update. The only other down side is that they recommend removing the battery compartment and removing the batteries overnight. The want is built so well when assembled, that it's a real pain the neck to take off the cover, remove the battery compartment, and then remove the batteries. It seems like an on/off switch could have been built. The battery compartment also has exposed electronics that can break from being dropped or having something spill on them. It's a real downside. But, the wand and the app are so great, that it's overall a really awesome product.

The media could not be loaded. First of all, the whole experience of opening this and putting it together was delightful. I've included an unboxing video so you can appreciate the thought that was put into the packaging because it really is that good. Putting together the wand is fairly straightforward and takes maybe two minutes at most, but I appreciated that the booklet included explains what the different parts inside the wand do. This was also cool because a lot of the tech toys I played with as a kid were purely about the software, and I think it's just as important that kids get to play with hardware as well as it is an entirely separate field. I had a little trouble getting the wand connected to the app, and it may be helpful to have an adult around for this. The app even crashed on me in the first five minutes or so, but after that it was a flawless experience. The interface with the challenges was quite fun and had the classic Harry Potter music which helped make the experience of using the wand feel more immersive. You get to make a profile and as you finish new challenges you can unlock different things to add to your avatar like a new hat or a pet rat. I was delighted to see that you could look at the underlying javascript code for your colourful drag and drop blocks if you wanted to look under the hood, and that you could code freely outside of the challenges if you wanted to. After making my way through he first 8 or so challenges, I checked out some creations from other players as well as the 9-10 pre-made ones. It was at this point that I wondered what the limitations are for what you can create. You have a pre-set "stage" so to speak, with lots of objects and backgrounds you can add to the area, and then pre-set wand motions that they say they've recorded thousands of times so that you don't have to nail it perfectly to get it to recognize your movement. Based on the things I did in the challenges and the other creations I saw, it felt like I hit the limit of what I could do fairly quickly. Not because of skill but because it felt repetitive in the limited environment. I imagine that could be a bit discouraging or frustrating to a kid who's really into it and wants to do more. That said, I am going to keep exploring the app and seeing how much I can do with it. I hope to update this review later with more details! One last thing: It may seem small, but I also really appreciated that the stickers included are the kind that will easily come off a window, table, or other surface as kids often put stickers in places you'd rather not leave them permanently.

Nephew loves it

So far so good. Lost a star for not responding to an email I sent about a lost part. Thankfully the wand still works without it!

Very fun! Got this for my daughter and she loves it!

Gift for grand daughter