Complicated

Not as great as I thought it would be

This was a gift for my 11 year old niece. Firstly it doesn’t work with hardly any of the things it’s says it does. Tested with a new Samsung tablet and fire tablet. Neither worked. Which meant that I had a very upset niece. It does however work with my windows laptop. So I now have a happy niece but no laptop. Once it was working she was over the moon and it’s a really good. So if you don’t have a windows laptop I can’t say if it will work or not.

This didn't hold my 9 year old's attention for very long at all unfortunately. It's rather basic for a child who already does coding.

I bought a brand new Kindle FireHD 10 and it wont let me download the app. I bought the kindle just for this. How do I get it to work! :(

This is a bit underwhelming. My daughters (7 and 9) are HUGE Harry Potter fans, so they were very excited about this when we opened it up. It is very sturdy and looks really neat and authentic. It is easy to start up, but that's pretty much where the ease of use stops. The hardware was very glitchy and we would get it working for a few minutes, but then it would cut out or not work. The tech support is pretty much non-existent. Overall, we weren't impressed with this as it really just ended up being an expensive wand to put on the shelf b/c it wouldn't work consistently.

The app itself is amazing. Lots and lots of flexibility. Plenty to explore and tinker with. Sadly the wand-tablet connection (brand new 2018 iPad) is inconsistent and frustrating. Too often the wand gets off-center and re-aligning it didn’t result in an actually centered wand. At one point no matter where I pointed the wand on the screen (and I was pointing the tip at the screen with the button on the wand facing up) — the wand tip appeared in the lower left corner. At one point I was able to get the orientation skewed by 90 degrees (up was right, right was down, etc). Removing the batteries and reconnecting it to the iPad Bluetooth solved that orientation issue but I still had to be careful that I didn’t press the button on the wand randomly. As an adult I can train myself to only press the button at the right times but kids are a little more button-pressing-happy. And since the centering doesn’t always work, it’s feasible that kids would get frustrated. If you’re still willing to try this out, realize that the app is somewhat forgiving on the accuracy of the wand movements. Some of them are pretty tricky to get right but you are allowed to pick and choose so it’s not like you can’t do a spell if the movements of the wand prove too intricate for the user. In the end, I’m not sure I would recommend this until there’s an update that addresses centering. (Last update fornmy review period was from just before Xmas 2018).

Attached is a picture of an iPad, landscape mode, and that’s a normal screen on one of your first tutorials. The problem here is that all the screen is taken up, some visual elements get hidden under others, in addition to terrible color choices for accessibility (white text on top of a fluorescent yellow/greenish background). Basically the software is a little clumsy, it’s not polished, certainly worse than most iPad apps out there. Going from the tiny picture to full screen is done by clicking a tiny expand icon. You can’t double tap on the image, or anything you would expect when interfacing in an iPad. Basically they got a rough/mediocre Windows application, and ported it to the iPad as is. So it doesn’t feel like an iPad app at all, just a clumsy experience. The accessibility problems with colors and overlapping interfaces is very annoying and shows poor quality assurance. Another really annoying issue is that there is no “off” button for the wand. In this day and age that is inexcusable. Basically if you need to take apart the wand to remove the batteries to turn it off. If not, you’ll just come back to a dead wand... why they didn’t add an on/off button in a $100 dollar product is beyond it. It also doesn’t include things that would excite kids (the Harry Potter coding kit doesn’t include Harry Potter for example...) The play area has a handful of premade code/spells. But it has no explanation of what you have to do in English. You have to go through 80 lines of “code” and figure out what some of their terminology is to understand what this does and how to play. A short sentence explanation on the top would be great. Basically it’s impossible for young children to really understand what to do. And for adults it’s hard and time consuming (some are obvious, others leave you dumbfounded). Basically a poor execution. Software is poor quality looks cheap/outdated. The tutorial itself is ok, and guides you through the basics, so start there. The reason it gets 3 stars is the wand waving to cast spells works pretty well, it picks up the motions and the differences and does the spell. You have to be a little accurate with the movements but not overly so. My 6 year old could do most of them (she fails sometimes, but succeeds more often than not). They did a very good job with the spell casting which saves this product from getting a 1-2 star rating. And instruction booklet with explanation one hay the most common commands mean would be good - again start with the tutorial/play to understand better (the normal Hogwarts play portion). Overall it is fun, but in order for your child to get the most out of it, they have to be good readers and you have to help them with some of the programming concepts. Some are easy and the game tries, but it seems more suited for 9+ year olds, and challenging for adults - you can chain a lot of things together to create complex spell scenarios. Anyway, my daughter enjoys it, but this felt short of expectations.

had a child reviewer for this one. There is definitely an initial "wow" factor for fans of the Harry Potter Universe. This uses a lot of the same learning engine as the computer itself so he was familiar and into that. It's a lot of gesture-based fun programming and it does work, so that's pretty neat. and the Hogwarts/wizarding world tie in is quite strong so it will be engaging for fans of the book. Still this is gimmicky, and limited, and the child reviewer in question lost interest fairly quickly, and this was resigned to the deep dark recesses of a drawer. If you really want your child to code, you are better off with some of the many available online systems which are cheap (or totally free), constantly updated, and give a range of difficulty that will allow a child to progress beyond the basics. Like all the kano stuff, it uses scratch underneath to teach coding essentials, and overall it does this pretty well, but the harry potter wand still ends up feeling rather limited in what you can do compared to most of their other 'normal computer' apps, like kano minecraft and all that. my verdict is that if you have a kid who has some level of interest in coding, the wand is not the best offering they have. BUT if you have a kid who loves Wizarding World and isn't that keen on coding and you're trying to lure them in, then the wand will do that very much. So for that certain subset of kids (inexperienced coder Harry Potter fanboys) it will be a win

Seems like good product if app worked better!