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We love maps and globes at Mini Travellers so I was excited to be given an Oregon Scientific Smart Globe Explorer AR to review.
The all new Oregon Scientific SmartGlobe Explorer has over 220 countries to explore, 42 games to play and over 2 1/2 hours of educational content! Despite hubby remarking on its significant size when we got it out of the box and brought it home from our half term holidays he deems it to be one of the best educational toys we’ve got!
The Oregon Scientific Smart Globe Explorer is aimed at children aged 5+. Perfect for mine aged 7, 6 and 6. As our Mini Travellers love learning about where the countries are that we visit, we already have a couple of globes in the house, and countless maps. How was this going to be different.
To be honest I thought what the kids were going to love was the AR feature, and that for me was one of the main reasons for getting the Oregon Scientific Smart Globe Explorer, however it is the ease with which the kids can play numerous games with the globe and try and beat the clock to find countries and cities that my three love the most.
You can see from Lily’s video below how the globe arrives. Once you get it out of the box (not easy) it all works straightaway. This is a huge selling point for me and find toys like this make Christmas day/Birthdays so much happier when the toy works straight from the box without having to realise that the type of batteries it requires are the only ones you don’t have! Anyway I digress.
The Oregon Scientific Smart Globe Explorer AR has three different age levels and then for each age, you can play different games. The challenges naturally get harder as they get older. To work everything you use the Smart Learning pen (aka the Rocket). You can charge this with the USB cable included. The rocket is fabulous and the only downside I can see is that unlike the ‘Adventure’ version of the Smart Globe the pen is NOT attached to the globe. I’m sure there are reasons for this but having already misplaced the rocket a couple of times during our week away, as younger cousins wanted to play with it as a rocket – the lack of cable does have its downsides!
The Oregon Scientific Smart Globe Explorer AR is pricey at £129.99, but I can already tell that this toy will be played with over and over again. Particularly when we are going to explore a new country and we can use the globe to find out how long it is going to take us to get there and what the history of the country is too.
The Augmented Reality does brings a new dimension to the globe (and to see how this works please do check out Susan K Mann’s Review here) but for us not something the children can do alone. Whilst the globe can look great
Take a look at Lily’s unboxing video which shows you how a 7 year old can play with it.
Disclaimer:- We received the sample for the purposes of this review, however, all thoughts and opinions are our own.
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Wow! What a fabulous review, we’ll done Lily. I’ll have to watch it again to check out all the features but it looks like you’ll have hours of fun with this.