Zoob building sets' claim to fame is that their five-piece building system mirrors the five nucleic acids that are the building blocks of life. I'm not sure how that is relevant to the process of building a walking bulldozer Princess Jasmine can drive via an imaginary microphone, but I'm sure there's a connection.

If you haven't guessed already, this is what really got us interested in the Zoob system. We love building robots, and we aren't ashamed of our parasitic harvesting of parts from other toys and devices. We let other people do the hard parts so we can focus on being creative. And that's what we were looking for when we asked Zoob to send us their ZoobMover Power Building Set to check out. I'll get into the details of how it all comes together in a minute, but the first thing you should know about this toy is that it will have your child squealing with frolicsome delight while it noisily grinds around the floor, sucking juice from its five batteries (four AA, one 9V, all included).



Z enjoys playing with building toys, and we frequently review them - Plan's lovely construction set, Bonz, Tinker Toys, Automoblox, Wedgits. We got a lot of mileage out of Mega Bloks back when Z was a toddler. But I've been looking for a less, well, blocky building toy that would captivate her. A robot seemed like a good point of entry.

But the foundational architecture of the Zoob system has some surprising limitations. There is a ball-and-socket connection that forms a joint that moves in two directions, and notches in the center of pieces that allow them to snap in an X-shape; all well and good. But another of the pieces' primary connections is for the "sockets" to snap together, each forming two sides of a rounded rectangular linkage, and these linkages are both awkward to snap together (with a moderate error rate even for adult users) and don't have much structural strength (they collapse easily when you are building with them).

Overall, at least in the fifty-piece set of building pieces that come with the ZoobMover, the five building blocks had us more conscious of the constraints of the system than its possibilities. I think someone with a different background could explain this problem in more mathematical terms - the number of possible connections and variations - but my explanation will have to remain at this level: They didn't feel very open-ended.


Of course, that's less of an issue when you're building a walking robot. The ZoobMover's gearbox is a great idea - it has open sockets for six legs and rocking nubby parts at each end and on the top, and kids just build their own legs and jittery appendages. The motor is controlled by an R/C unit with two little joysticks, one for each side of its body; this means a reasonably adept user can turn tight circles as well as going forward or backward. (The controls are a bit tricky for Z at just under five, but certainly nothing too difficult for slightly older kids.) The resulting walker is the very kind of robot that is the most out of reach for amateur roboticists like Z and I. (Zoob also makes a set you can use to build an R/C car.)


And Princess Jasmine seems to enjoy patrolling the hinterlands of our kitchen and dining room in it.



The ZoobMover has an MSRP of $45 and retails for about $35 on Amazon. Other Zoob sets on offer cluster in the $30 to $50 range.