One Trick Wonder, 30 Mar 2008
I was looking for a fun crystal growing set for my kids and opted for this one since it seemed to be very common. My concern with these sorts of products is that they turn out to be a load of hot air around single "trick" snd this is exactly what this product is.
The crystal tree is the centre piece of the product and is extremely fragile, to the extend that once grown you dare not even touch it. The rest of the experiments are about growing crystals with salt or vinegar, which you have to provide yourself. Whatever happened to crystal gardens with copper sulphate, etc?
Very disappointing.
Excellent value for money, 04 Dec 2006
I bought this for my daughters 10th birthday, and it was a great success.
Watching the crystals grow was really amazing, even to those of us over 18, and the 'trees' are truly beautiful.
They are very, *very* fragile though, so if you want to leave them on display after they have grown make sure you put them in the spot where they will be displayed right from the start. Look at them the wrong way and they fall apart!
Disappointing, 16 Jan 2006
This toy needs a well educated parent to be of any educational value. The crystal growing bits consist of a flimsy plastic base, a small amount of alum, some food colouring, a 'spider' cut out of blotting paper, two plastic reservoirs and a piece of string. There is also a 'geode', a plastic magnifying lens and three cards with some information on.
You dissolve the alum in 70cc of water, and use this to fill pools in the base into which you place the spider and the two chips of rock (plus the food colouring).
In our set, the chips of rock were nonabsorbent and so did not grow crystals at all. Instead, their pool grew small crystals, which we repeatedly scraped out as it dried up, redisolved, and totally failed to get anything to grow on the chips.
The spider collapsed as soon as it was wet, but did eventually grow some crystals, but took a great deal of surreptitious fiddling by parents after bedtime to keep it looking anything like a crouching arachnid.
The string, suspended between two reservoirs filled with salty water, did not drip to form stalactites and stalagmites. It became a very thick crusty, salty piece of string. The surplus water dripped back into the spider pool, making the spider collapse again.
At least we still had the geode. Well, we had a solid chink of quartz, it turned out, not a hollow crystal lined bubble at all.
So this was cheap, and a bit disappointing. "I want another crystal set - a bigger one that works" says our kid.
