I recently purchased the
30 Days Lost In Space kit from
inventr.io. I'd probably give it 3/5 stars. There were fun parts, but it felt disjointed and the retail price seemed really high.
Some of the lessons were easy to get through, some took a few days (mostly because I wanted to write out all of the code myself). I've recommended the kit to some others, including nephews. I had been looking at getting the kit for a couple years before, but when I saw that they were selling off the last of the current version at a discounted price in preparation for the next, I felt it was time to grab it. Now that I'm through the course, I'm glad that I got it, but I'm also glad that I didn't pay full price. The original retail price was $150, but I was able to get it on sale for about $45. That's the price range where I feel it's good, especially since there are things that felt clunky in the course.
First of all, I really enjoyed it in the beginning. The space theme was cool, although it was a little confusing to me when they kept referring to "being underwater" for the first few "days" when I would have expected more of a situation of floating through space. I felt like I got the most enjoyment out of the course at the beginning and into the second "week" of the course. That's when everything was new and fresh, and I expected that little steps were being made toward something bigger.
I'm assuming some of the issues are because they recently moved to a different website. I saw several comments about people losing their progress when everything moved over. Almost every page through the course had broken images and to me it lacked a clear flow of how you were expected to approach each "Day", which I'll refer to as a lesson simply because I could go through multiple "Days" in a single sitting. The video is presented at the top of each lesson and if you watch the video before you look at the rest of the page, you'll probably notice that the people in the video refer to things that you should have already done... like possibly copying-and-pasting code into your Arduino IDE from further down the page.
Aside from lesson layout though, another thing that I expected was to see more of a build up for the project, like a larger end goal. Of course, it was nice having a little bit about each component and it makes sense especially at the beginning to have one component at a time, but later on when you're adding, the removing, then adding again, then removing again, and then ultimately having 3 lessons where there wasn't anything different about the physical components and the code explanation felt lacking. I even got a little frustrated with repetition of what we should recognize by ... well, at least the end of the first week, especially juxtaposed with the lack of explanation on what might have been the most interesting bits of the lesson.
Finally, inconsistency and lack of re-usability for the code also got a bit frustrating. There are days where they talk about changing just a little, but if you were trying to follow along and make adjustments to your own code for a following lesson that seemed to be reusing stuff, you'd notice that things were named differently or something that wasn't even focused on got changed. Since this is expected to be a beginner course, I can definitely imagine some people getting lost part way through. If they didn't just copy-and-paste everything, stuff could easily be missed when the video instructions would contradict the code or wiring diagram.
I'll probably go back through the lessons again, especially some of the stuff at the end, where a little video game was made. That seemed like some missed opportunity to build up some knowledge but instead it was thrown at you in such a way that copy-and-paste was the only way to get through the "Day" in hopes that more explanation would come. I would have preferred a pace where something was brought to our attention and explained more before moving onto the next day. In a couple of the videos it was mentioned that it would take too long to explain all the code, but then the instructor goes on with explaining once again that the line that says "#require Arduino.h is automatically added by the IDE" for the 10th time in the course.
The message board on the site was a promising feature for future "adventurers" to request help, although there seemed to be a bug on the site where messages would be displayed on the wrong page when they were first written, so that made some messages appear to be in the wrong place until you reloaded the page. I had some fun in little discussions about projects there and was even able to help steer some people in the right direction for their projects.
(Note: Photos shown here include additional components that were not included in the kit. The long breadboard, some of the wiring, the 9v battery and adapter, along with the knob on the rotary encoder were all pieces that were my own additions for "creative day" projects that I kept using.)
