Gakken Otona no Kagaku Kits Series

Gakken Otona no Kagaku Kits Series

News:
5/12/12 - Updated image for Delta Twister, and moved entry to Numbered Mook section again. Added entry for kit #35, steam engine.
5/07/12 - Added link for review to Theo Jansen DVD mook, and for review of SX-150 Mark II.
4/20/12 - Added release date and price for the unnumbered Twister kit.
2/8/12 - Added review link for kit #33, the Desktop Cleaning Robot. Changed links to point to wordpress reviews.
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Gakken is a publisher of magazines, mooks (magazine books) and science kits for both children and adults. Collected here are the "Otona no Kagaku" ("Adult Science") kits. I'm ignoring the children's kits largely because they're not as interesting, and it's not worth trying to buy them as imports. You can find info on them from Gakken's online shop. What I do have are the two sets of Adult Science kits - the mook series and the kit-only series. The mook series packages a really nice glossy magazine-book filled with background info, descriptions of other science experiments to try, and various stories of science history, along with the kit itself. The kit-only series contains a much higher-quality kit, usually a "premium" version of a mook kit but without the mook. Usually, the mook kits have volume numbers, but there are some exceptions (such as with the synthesizer and the aurorium). I'm currently only buying and reviewing the numbered mook series kits. The ones that don't have reviews are ones I haven't bought yet.

Note that many of the lower-numbered kits are out of print, which is why I don't have kits 3, 4, 5, 7 and 12 now. These are available from collectors, but at 2 to 10 times the original cover price. New kits come out roughly once every 3 months.

The mook kits are designed to be customized and otherwise modded. The mooks often have several pages of customizations as suggested and implemented by the authors and editors. Not all of the kits are worth modding, though, so I'll only put in links to mods that I've done myself. Note that the obvious first mod to any kit that runs on batteries is to add a mono headphone jack to connect up an external DC power supply.

- Curtis
ThreeStepsOverJapan

Visit the Otona no Kagaku Ranking Chart here.

Numbered Mook Kits

No.	Title	Cover Price (Yen)	Review	Date Published	Magazine
1	Self-Propelling Boat	1680	Review	4/1/03	Magazine
2	Finger Printing Kit	1680	Review	8/1/03	Magazine
3	Pinhole Camera	1680	Not Reviewed	12/19/03	Magazine
4	Crystal Radio	1680	Not Reviewed	4/1/04	Magazine
5	Illuminated Microscope	1680	Not Reviewed	7/1/04	Magazine
6	Phonograph	1800	Review Mods	12/24/04	Magazine
7	Steam Engine Car	1800	Not Reviewed	3/1/05	Magazine
8	Slow Clock	1800	Review	8/10/05	Magazine
9	Planetarium	2200	Review Mods	11/1/05	Magazine
10	Sterling Engine	2100	Review Mods	1/15/06	Magazine
11	Newtonian Telescope	2100	Review Mods	4/20/06	Magazine
12	DaVinci Helicopter	2100	Not Reviewed	6/27/06	Magazine
13	Kaleidoscope Projector	2100	Review Mods	10/20/06	Magazine
14	Stereo Pinhole Camera	2300	Review Mods	12/1/06	Magazine
15	Reflective Movie Projector	2300	Review Mods	3/1/07	Magazine
16	Tea-Carrying Windup Doll	2300	Review Mods	6/1/07	Magazine
17	Mini Theremin	2300	Review Mods	10/20/07	Magazine
18	Wind-Powered Generator	2300	Review	12/1/07	Magazine
19	Galileo-Style Telescope	2300	Review Mods	4/25/08	Magazine
20	Bird Organ	2500	Review	6/27/08	Magazine
21	Magnet Motor Car	2500	Review	10/15/08	Magazine
22	Edo-Era Static Generator	2500	Review	12/21/08	Magazine
23	Poulson Wire recorder	2500	Review	3/31/09	Magazine
24	4-Bit Microcomputer	2500	Review Mods Programming Guide	6/30/09	Magazine
25	35 mm Reflex Camera	2500	Review	10/30/09	Magazine
26	Mini Electric Guitar	3675	Review	12/17/09	Magazine
27	8-bit Microcontroller	3360	Review Mods Tutorial	5/14/10	Magazine
28	Edo-style Clock	2950	Review Mods w/ Japanino Project	7/28/10	Magazine
29	Origami Lamp	3000	Review Mods w/ Japanino Project	11/5/10	Magazine
30	Animaris Ordis Parvus	3500	Review	01/15/11	Magazine
31	Ornithopter and Entompoter	2400	Review	06/09/11	Magazine
32	Mini Denshi Block	3990	Review	11/30/11	Magazine
33	Desktop Robot Vacuum	2940	Review	1/30/12	Magazine
34	Twister Entomopter	2940	Not Reviewed	5/17/12	Magazine
35	2-Cylinder Steam Engine	TBD	Not Reviewed	Late 7/12	Magazine

Sound Gadget Series

This is a new series of kits announced around September, 2011, building on the popularity of the SX-150 mini-synth, and the Theremin. These are slightly higher-end musical toys intended to introduce users to the basics. There's no mook, and probably little to no assembly required. So, in this sense these are not "kits".

Title	Cover Price (Yen)	Date Published
SX-150 Mark II This is an upgrade to the original SX-150, with the addition of VCF and LFO controls, and a Resonance control instead of just the switch.	7350	10/30/11 Review
Udar The Udar is a very strange synth that is played kind of like how you solve the Rubik's cube. Gakken first announced the Udar in 2010 and it's still in development. No tentative release date or price yet.	TBA	TBA

Unnumbered Mook Kits

The mooks for these kits only cover the history of that specific type of kit (that is, the vacuum tube variometer radio mook talks about vacuum tubes, and their use in radios), the theory of operation, and gives instructions for building the kit. The radio and synth mooks also offer suggestions for simple mods).

Title	Cover Price	Date Published	Magazine
SX-150 Analog Synthesizer The synth consists of a pre-assembled circuit board and speaker, the case, knobs, stylus and resistive strip. Takes between 15-20 minutes to assemble. Uses 4 AA batteries.	3360	7/30/08	Gakken Page Review
Science and Study Science and Study is more of a nostalgia piece than anything else. It's dedicated to Gakken's output as a science publisher. Half of the mook is a look at all of the toys and kits Gakken came out with from the 1960's to 2009, and the rest is either articles from famous people reminiscing over their favorite toys, or reprints of manga that had been in some of the science magazines. The attached kit is a glow-in-the-dark skeleton. If you like older manga, it's worth getting the mook.	1680	4/17/10	Gakken Page Review
Aurorarium The aurorarium kit consists of a pre-assembled base and LED stand, a fogged plastic cone, and some reflective disks. Light from the LED bounces off the slowly spinning disk, and is diffused by the plastic cone. The three LEDs cycle between red, green, blue and various combinations of each as kind of an updated lava lamp. Takes no more than 10 minutes to assemble. Uses 4 AA batteries. This is not actually one of the Otona no Kagaku kits, as it's part of the Kagaku no Tamago (Science Egg) children's series, but it's always included in with the adult kits in the bookstores.	2200		Gakken Page Review
Hand-made Speaker The cover shows all of the parts of the kit. Lots of gluing to do. If you're careful and take your time, it may take 1-2 hours to fully assemble and let the glue dry, then it's up to you as to what to do for the housing. May represent 15 minutes of actual assembly.	2940		Gakken Page
Variometer 1 Vacuum Tube AM Radio Unlike the other kits in the unnumbered mook series, this one actually requires some work to build. There's the case, antenna forms, vacuum tube, battery casings, and wire to make the antenna coils. Maybe 15 parts total, and with the hand-winding of the coils can take 60-90 minutes to assemble. Uses one C cell, and three 9 volt batteries. One suggested mod by Gakken is to turn it into a wireless telegraph. The audio signal is weak and there's no volume control, so you'll want to add an audio jack to a powered external speaker.	3250	5/26/09	Gakken Page Review
Rhinoceros Mini-Beest The sequel to kit #30, the Theo Jansen Animaris Ordis Parvus.	3500	07/30/11	Gakken Page Review

Mook-Only

While the Otona no Kagaku series is largely dedicated to building things, there have been a couple of releases that consisted of just the magazine, with or without a DVD. I haven't given these products the attention they deserve, so I'm going to remedy that now and include them in the list (as of Feb., 2012). Note that the older ones are harder to find in the bookstores primarily because they're located in with the normal books rather than grouped together with the other kits. For example, the Korg book was in Digital Music; Rocket and Space was in Misc. Astronomy; and From Materials to Life was in General Science.

Title	Cover Price	Date Published	Web Page
Rocket and Space Exploration This is just the mook, with LOTS of photos of rockets, satellites and some close-ups of the planets. There's a comparison of rockets from various countries, the history of rocket and space exploration, a discussion of the Cold War space race, and a look at what's required to live on the space station. There's also a fold-out cutaway poster of a Saturn-V.	1680	7/14/09	Gakken Page Review
World of Theo Jansen's Strandbeest with DVD A color mook showing pictures of Theo Jansen and his creations, plus a 23-page semi-biographical manga. The 45-minute DVD contains an interview with Jansen and footage of the beests in action.	1800	7/21/2011	Gakken Page Review
Korg DS-10 Synthesizer This is an instruction book for playing with the Nintendo DSi running a Korg synth simulator (which you can buy directly from Korg). It contains profiles of 17 Japanese sound "meisters", and a list of 100 suggested waveform settings.	1800	12/11/09	Gakken Page
From Materials to Life This is a collection of the science commentary and history articles that had appeared in the first few numbered kit mooks, issued as a hardback book. Lots of photos of scientists and machines from the first half of the 1900's.	1890	11/5/09	Gakken Page Review

Kit-Only

Title	Cover Price	Date Published	Web Page
Premium Theremin	9,975	12/18/08	Gakken Page
8mm Film Projector	7,980		Gakken Page
Two Edo-Era Tea Carrying Wind-up Dolls	6,195 8,190		Gakken Page English Instructions
Arrow Shooting Boy Wind-Up Doll	10,290		Gakken Page English Instructions
Somersaulting Wind-Up Doll	5,981		Gakken Page English Instructions
Premium Gramophone	7,980		Gakken Page
Vacuum Tube Amp	12,390		Gakken Page
Crystal Radio	5,775		Gakken Page
Vacuum Tube Radio, Ver. 1	8,800		Gakken Page
Vacuum Tube Radio, Ver. 2	9,801		Gakken Page
Edison-Style Cup Phonograph	3,045		Gakken Page English Instructions
New Edison-Style Cup Phonograph	2,981		Gakken Page
Berliner-Style Gramophone	4,095		Gakken Page English Instructions
Programmable Robot I got this kit as a present for a friend. It's cool in its simplicity. Basically, it's a pair of motors connected to a battery through two photoresistors. Light from an LED bounces off the disk and hits the photoresistors, changing the motor speeds. As the robot advances, the disk rotates and the black ink marks represent the "program". The "program" then lets you trace different patterns with the robot's movement.	3,990		Gakken Page English Instructions
Volta-style Carbon Battery Kit	3045		Gakken Page
Marconi-style Electric Wave Car	3360		Gakken Page
Mechanical Crab	5,981		Gakken Page English Instructions
Mechanical Inchworm	5,981		Gakken Page English Instructions
Mechanical Centipede	7,980		Gakken Page English Instructions
Stirling Engine	9,801		Gakken Page English Instructions
Vacuum Engine	15,540		Gakken Page