Amazon STEM Toy Club Review, Ages 3 to 4 – January 2018

Amazon has launched a STEM Club Toy subscription box! This monthly subscription delivers "handpicked, high-quality Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math toys" to your door for $19.99/month.

We signed up for Amazon's STEM Toy Club subscription as soon as it launched, and this is our tenth (!) delivery. This subscription looks like any other shipment from Amazon, with no exterior branding on the box or special insert:

There are 3 age range options:

• 3-4-year-olds (counting, building, and cause and effect)
• 5-7 year-olds (hands-on experiments and explorations of electricity, earth science, and simple math)
• 8-13-year-olds (more complex projects and experiments based on principals of physics, chemistry, and engineering)

My Subscription Addiction paid for this box. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)

This is a review of the 3-4-year-old age range Amazon STEM Club, $19.99/month.

About This Subscription from Amazon

The Subscription Box: Amazon STEM Toy Club

The Cost: $19.99 per month

The Products: Each month you will receive a different, age-appropriate STEM toy.

Ships to: U.S. (free shipping)

January's Toy: Maze-O, The Mighty Maze Maker

Maze-O Starter Set - Retail Value $29.87 (Available here for $28.31)

This is an interesting toy, and definitely new to me. I like that it's a colorful building toy that you can interact with a bit beyond just building.

Essentially, Maze-O lets you easily build mazes following included pattern cards (or you can invent your own). The inventor snippet on the back says the parents who created this toy were inspired by their son making mazes out of blocks he already had when he became frustrated that they were easily knocked over and destroyed.

The package comes with 52 maze pieces in red, blue, yellow and green. There's also a set of instruction cards with Easy, Medium, and Hard level maze ideas.

The maze pieces come in a variety of different shapes, letting you build entry/exit points, straightaways, corners, and dead ends. They were really easy for my toddler to connect; they nest inside each other easily and don't require any force. (As long as the maze is sitting on a flat surface, they stay connected, but they're not designed to be lifted up or anything like that.)

What's interesting about this toy is that it challenges your kid in a few different ways. If they follow the pattern cards, there is a lot of problem-solving in how to decipher the image and find the correct pieces to put into place, and the logical order to build the puzzle itself.

If your child is too young to follow those type of instructions, then they'll probably enjoy helping you find pieces, and then trying to solve the maze.

My son is approaching 3 years old, and following the cards was a little much for him. He enjoyed building and playing with the shapes on his own, though.

Mainly, we played by having him pick a maze from the cards, and then I'd build it with his help and he'd try to solve it by driving a car along the paths. He was definitely interested in this toy and has since picked it out to play with a few different times. I think he mainly enjoys building these "roads" and seeing how he can change the path by using different pieces, so I can see a bit of logic and decision making playing out in his head as well.

Verdict: Amazon's STEM Toy Club is always a source for a new type of toy I haven't seen before. This month's toy definitely appealed to my son's love of building things and driving cars, and I can see that he may find new ways to play with this as he gets older, too.

Value-wise, we've had some much better value in past months, but I'm still receiving a toy that retails for more than the $19.99 price of the box.

To Wrap Up:

What do you think of this month's toy from the Amazon STEM Club Toy subscription box?