Zometool Building Sets: where science and art meet

It’s a rare activity that keeps a 4-year-old, 12-year-old and 30-{something}-year-old entertained for hours, but I think I’ve finally hit on the holy grail of all ageless activities – building stuff.  I figured this out this Thanksgiving with the help of Zometool and our holiday gatherings will now never be the same again.   

Thanksgiving up until now in our family consisted of two separate camps – the grown-ups and the kids.  Unfortunately, my 12-year-old niece was born in the gap between generations that left her too young for grown up activities but too old for the youngest generation who are mostly in diapers.  Usually, she passes the time by sitting with the grown-ups and looking slightly amused, but not this year.

This year I brought two sets of Zometool to the gathering specifically for her and told her to have fun.  I brought Ice Crystals and Stars with 90 pieces because I thought we could make some fun holiday snowflakes and designs and Crazy Bubbles with 52 pieces as I thought bubbles would be fun even for the younger kiddos. 

Many there had never heard of Zometool, so we gathered quite the crowd as I explained that they are the new highly addictive building sets designed for kids aged 6-16.  They may be made for kids, but they are also used by Nobel Prize winners, teachers, and apparently, 30-somethings.  At first glance they look like your typical rod-and-connector building sets, but once you start tinkering with them, you realize they are so much more than you imagined. 

Sure, you can randomly connect spheres and rods as my 4 year old did, but the fun really starts when you figure out that the connector pieces are not simply spheres with holes all around them, those tiny holes are actually different shaped openings that only certain rods connect with.  This makes building with them more challenging than a child’s toy, yet more fun to try and master as you create larger and more complex shapes and structures.

The three of us set up shop in the back living room and emptied all 142 pieces onto the table as well as the instructions included in both kits.  And, as it turns out, in addition to being beautiful, my niece is also incredibly creative and extremely talented because she barely needed instructions, she instinctively knew just what to do.  While I must admit my learning curve was much slower than my niece’s, once I “got” it, it was only a matter of time and I was creating more and more advanced shapes for our first bubble experiment.

We sat and worked together building all sorts of crazy structures and designs for hours and hours, only stopping for a quick turkey dinner and to test our structures in the bubble mixture outside.  After two rounds of bubbles, we then switched to creating snowflakes and stars and kept on creating until the party came to an end. 

At the end of the party, my niece and I were both hooked and she told me that she loved playing with the Zometool all day long.  I know she would really like the Plato’s Solids Zometool set, so even though I’ve already got her gift this Christmas, I’m passing along the info to her grandma.

And, now her grandma can snag an awesome 15% off and free shipping because I’ve got an exclusive coupon code to share with you!  Simply enter the coupon code Rave at checkout on Zometool.com and you can score some Zometool sets of your own until November 30th.  Perfect for holiday shopping for all those kids interested in science, architecture, art or engineering, as well as those kids who need a little less screen time. 

Zometool sets are made in Colorado and have won all sorts of awards just in the past year.  They have many kits available as well as creator sets that give you open-ended fun for hours.  What set would you choose?

A big thank you to Zometool for sending samples to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions are 100% ours and no form of monetary compensation was received in exchange for this Rave Review.