That’s great! I’m a computer programmer for my (part-time) day job and I didn’t learn to program at all until I was 18 and in college, so there’s no rush. Also, Scratch, which is what I’m really interested in, can be used for free on any computer. I liked the idea of my son having his own beginner computer and it comes installed as part of this kit, but I don’t even think you need to install it to use it. I’m pretty sure there’s a version that can be used entirely online. I plan to look into it more and hopefully follow up with some really simple tutorials. Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment. :)

No problem! I just saw right after I posted this that the 2017 version is out. It wasn’t on Amazon when I bought my kit in early September. The 2017 version is too new to have many reviews, but hopefully they’ve worked out some of the bugs. So far, glitches haven’t been too big of an issue for us, but it would be great to have a completely bug-free product!

Hi, Herminia! You’re right! That’s annoying. I paid $120. If you’re really interested in buying it, you might want to think about setting a price watch on CamelCamelCamel for when it drops back down to $120. You can see from this link that the price history seems to fluctuate a lot. Unfortunately, it’s possible that the reason for the price increase is that the 2017 edition is now out so there’s a lower supply of the 2016 edition (which is what we used). The 2017 edition appears to be $145 right now.

As for the skepticism, I don’t blame you. For such a low price, you know it has to have limitations or issues. As I mention at the end of my post, my son *has* experienced a couple bugs. Once he had to restart the system to get Minecraft to work properly. However, he has played for hours and hours and he hasn’t experienced anywhere near the amount of glitches that first reviewer on Amazon has experienced. It’s definitely not perfect, but I think it’s a fair price for what it is — a really simple, inexpensive, kid-friendly computer that promotes teaching kids to learn to program (especially at $120 vs. $150). Apart from that first reviewer, it seems like most people are pretty happy with it. Our family definitely falls in that camp.