Professor Maxwell's VR Junior Chef - Virtual Reality Kids Cookbook and Interactive Food Science STEM Learning Activity Set (Materials & Book Only - Goggles Sold Separately) - for Ages 8 and Up

Bought this for my son's birthday (which is just after Christmas) he tried it once and gave up, but I encouraged him to give it another go. The Goggles are a tad useless, especially as they focus poorly. If it was half the price, it might have been good for the utensils and book, but the VR side of it is not worth it.

9 year old got this for Christmas, he has had fun with it but he doesn’t care much for the VR headset. Cookbook and supplies he uses a lot!

Great gift for my 9 year old! She’s very excited as we purchase the needed ingredients for these delicious meals that are turning out well so far! Well organized material, excellent quality spiral bound book, and educational as well as fun! Many added interesting facts and explanations about cooking practices.

The physical materials in this kit are of decent quality, small pieces of cooking gear. It's maybe a notch above "toy level" in what it is, but not by much. It's usable but we ended up mostly just using our regular kitchen gear after a while. I think the very young will appreciate what's in the box, but older kids will probably want to skip it. This kit is great because it would have been really easy for them to just leave it as a collection of activities revolving around executing some simple recipes and I think a lot of kids would still have fun with that, but they go the extra mile and inject a lot of learning opportunities into it (how or why things are the way they are, how certain processes involved in preparing the food work scientifically etc.). None of it is too advanced, but it's not complete fluff content either. The core experience of the kits are really the augmented reality system through the app, most everything else including the "VR" aspect plays off of that. The kit comes with a really nice printed book of activities, exercises and learning opportunities which is usable all on it's own but it comes to life when you use the free companion app which uses your phones camera to recognize the page you're pointing it at and add in virtual objects visible only on the phone right onto the pages. Some of the pages do things like when you point the phone at certain parts of it, it will overlay and play videos that appear to exist right on the page. The actual VR headset, of course for something in this price point, is really just a shell with some lenses which show a separate part of your phone screen to each eye. The fidelity is rather low, but it works surprisingly well and was certainly good enough to amaze my kids which had zero prior experience with VR. The residual bonus is that the VR Headset included in the kit is totally usable with any other VR apps and experiences you can find, so just because you've exhausted all of the activities included in the kit doesn't mean you can't keep finding new things to do with the headset. I do feel like the price point is a bit on the high side if you look at it in terms of the individual physical components here, but as a complete package it's cohesive, interesting and educational. Overall I think you could do a LOT worse for the money when it comes to these STEM kits, especially for kids on the lower end of the age range on the box.

I have been fortunate enough to try a variety of Professor Maxwell’s VR kits. This kit isn’t my favourite, but it is still a cool concept and engages creativity in my children. The kit comes with a bunch of different baking accessories, a detailed cooking activity book and the VR glasses for which a phone is attached. I like the way the activity book is laid out. It has very clear instructions in simple language, it’s colourful and the recipes are laid out from easy to difficult. A lot of the recipes are easy for adults to make, but are great beginner recipes for children. Most of the recipes require the stove top or oven to complete. The app is really easy to work as well. It recognizes the recipe and a professor pops up and starts talking. The goggles fit well on the face, and the kids find them comfortable. The VR experience is a little trippy, but the kids are really liking it. Overall, this is a cool kit. It’s not my favourite out of all the kits they make as this one requires a lot of adult supervision. The kids still find it fun to use.