This is an incredibly teaching tool and platform, cleverly disguised as a children's toy. There's a ton of educational products on the marketing trying to get kids interested in STEM - things like Snap Circuits, Goldieblox, LittleBits, Lego Mindstorms, even code.org. The problem is that they are good at the science, but aren't actually "fun". They're great, but they're really just an incremental step over other building blocks like Legos. Piper gives you the building blocks, captures the fun and power behind Minecraft, and then adds a whole engaging in-game story mode on top of that to give kids a REASON to use the building blocks. My 7 year old was building real physical circuits right out of the box, the same kind of circuits that I didn't see until I was in engineering school! Incredible. Head and shoulders above and several generations ahead anything else on the market right now.