I wish these were available when I was younger! A fantastic playground to learn many beneficial skills from coding, electronics, and mechanical engineering all merging in the robotics world. The build was straightforward and easy. Connecting the IDE to the microcontroller was a little tricky the first time until I watched the entire second video provided in the IDE to figure out I missed running the program as administrator (Windows). Hacking the code has been fun and educational. It could be difficult for someone who has no background or basic understanding of code since there isn't any direct tutorial or training for the code portion. Just reach out to the community or the Mark Robot for help.

We just got our first Hack Pack - IR Turret in today and built it. It took around 30 minutes to put together (11 year old 6th grader with 30s engineer dad helping). Worked great with good fit of servos, wires, and other parts. Starter code worked great! Production value for video instructions were excellent and the manual was a nice supplement, if we needed to slow down. Looking forward to customizing code and adding a few additional sensors we have laying around while we wait for the next Pack!

To be honest, Hack Pack seems to just coming out of its beta phase (the website says the subscription is currently for early adopters), but things are definitely constantly being worked on to make it better. Since replacement parts if it doesn't work are completely free, it's basically guaranteed to work eventually, in the rare case that it doesn't work for you right away. It's been fun talking with people on the Discord and helping people find what is causing their issues =P

To the other low reviews about loose connections, since they remodeled the breadboard version this should be muuuch less frequent of an issue - if it's an issue for you and you request a replacement, they'll send the new version. To the one review about the domino bot not turning on, this happens when you accidentally connect some of the red and black wires backwards (which lets the power flow straight back into the battery without powering the arduino, this is called short-circuiting).