I'm a little biased because I worked on creating this kit, but this past weekend we had an event with 35 attendees, mostly high school students and a handful of professional web developers, that went astoundingly well. There was only a single attendee that experienced issues, but they were admittedly unfamiliar with the linux laptop that they brought. Everyone else at the event had a great time and really enjoyed their first experiences programming hardware with this kit. The Experimenter's Guide was crucial to their success—it had all the information necessary to get up and running and be successful!

good documentation and tutorials,!

Well thought out kit with interesting projects and online explanations of everything. Most of the tutorials and books you can find for arduino and raspberry pi devices are in the arduino and python languages. If you want to be able to do these same things with hardware in the javascript language, this is a great place to start!

My daughter (4th Grade) and I have started playing with it together. We are already brainstorming for her science project this year in school.

Love this thing. Perfect for what it claims to be: an introduction to electronics for a newbie without any experience. Granted, I do have software development experience so I skip a lot of the JavaScript tutorials.

SparkFun has a lot of great beginners articles about electronics that I've been taking advantage of.

Also I've been reaching out to the Tessel slack group for help with the actual microcontroller and other semi-related questions. They've been very helpful!

Awesome kit to start....

I was not able to install the t2-cli package on Linux Mint 18 Cinnimon 64 bit.

After successfully installing the latest LTS version of node.js, following the instructions, I ran the following commands

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev libudev-dev
sudo npm install t2-cli -g

At this point the installation process failed with the following transcript

npm ERR! Linux 4.4.0-34-generic
npm ERR! argv "/usr/bin/nodejs" "/usr/bin/npm" "install" "t2-cli" "-g"
npm ERR! node v6.9.1
npm ERR! npm  v3.10.8
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! usb@1.2.0 install: `node-pre-gyp install --fallback-to-build`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the usb@1.2.0 install script 'node-pre-gyp install --fallback-to-build'.
npm ERR! Make sure you have the latest version of node.js and npm installed.
npm ERR! If you do, this is most likely a problem with the usb package,
npm ERR! not with npm itself.
npm ERR! Tell the author that this fails on your system:
npm ERR!     node-pre-gyp install --fallback-to-build
npm ERR! You can get information on how to open an issue for this project with:
npm ERR!     npm bugs usb
npm ERR! Or if that isn't available, you can get their info via:
npm ERR!     npm owner ls usb
npm ERR! There is likely additional logging output above.

I have also viewed on the github project site a number of the problem reports related to this issue. The thing that concerns me is the continued re-frame I see that these problems are not with the t2-cli software but with "permissions" on Linux. As a long time, open source developer, this attitude is totally unsatisfactory to me. If Arduino can consistently release software that works with the USB interface on Linux machines, why cannot the Tessel.io team? If the Tessel team can resolve these problems in the future, then I might be interested.

I'm having a good time refreshing basic concepts, that used anymore since high school (quite a long time ago, i can tell), and getting intoduced to the J5 environment. I like tessel2, never used it before. Now I'm looking for more free time and, provably, getting some new modules