Headu The Human Body Under X-Ray Review

Reviewed by Melody Floyde

As a parent of two young boys, aged 6 and 10 years, I’m always on the lookout for new products for them that will be both educational and fun, that they will want to engage with. Having spent several months home-schooling the boys during the covid pandemic I have realised how difficult it can be to gain their attention and any product that can do this is a winner in my eyes.

When I was asked to try out The Human Body Under X-Ray from Headu I jumped at the chance as it sounded like it would fit the bill nicely of being both educational and fun at the same time. Having never heard of Headu I headed to their website (www.Headu.com) to find out more and was impressed to see that they are an Italian company who design fun, high-quality games, toys, book and apps to help teach children essential skills using an innovative teaching method called Lifelong Playing Headu (or LPH for short) which activates multiple forms of intelligence in children to help them learn. There was a lot of information on this on the website which I found fascinating. They also make a lot of different products.

Anyway, back to the product in question, The Human Body Under X-Ray is an 84-piece jigsaw puzzle which shows the skeleton, systems, functions and vital organs of the human body. It is divided into two sections, one showing the organs and the other showing the skeleton and bones. Inside the box there is also a magic torch, some mission cards and an erasable pen. The product is aimed at children aged 6-10 years.

When the product arrived, I was impressed by the brightly coloured box which was really engaging and my children were excited to open it up and have a look inside. Upon opening the box all of the pieces inside were loose, meaning that there was no unnecessary packaging, which was a nice change to having to throw away vast amounts of plastic which is the case with so many children’s products.

The pieces of the jigsaw were a decent size, very brightly coloured and good quality. My boys both set to work immediately putting together the puzzle. When complete the puzzle measured 60 x 36cm which was a nice size, big enough to see what everything was but not so huge as to take up too much space, which is at a premium in our house. Their attention then turned to the magic torch and the mission cards. We deduced from the back of the box that they had to search for all of the different body parts listed on the mission cards by lighting up the puzzle with the magic torch, which revealed lots of body parts and their names which couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. It was actually very clever, because the torch was ultra violet it made the hidden parts glow white and the boys really enjoyed playing “x-rays” with it. They haven’t completed all of the missions yet, but have enjoyed looking at the different body parts. Having an erasable pen is a great idea as it means the mission cards can be used over and over again.

There are a couple of points to note about the product. Firstly, the torch needs 3 AAA batteries which aren’t included, so make sure you have these. Luckily after rummaging around we managed to find some batteries in another torch that we could use (the boys were not willing to wait until our Amazon order arrived!). Another point to note is that there are no instructions within the product (or at least there weren’t in ours), however these are available to download on the website and I would advise you do this as they gave a lot more information about the product and also on how to use the mission cards to their full benefit, for example with timed missions etc. This makes a lot of sense as to be honest we weren’t quite sure, and the boys weren’t overly keen to do all 20 missions. If there was some kind of competitive element I think they would enjoy this more.

Overall this is a nice product which is engaging for children and is also educational so is ideal to support learning at home. In my opinion, whilst the jigsaw is well suited to six-year olds, I would say that the naming of the body parts was a bit advanced for my youngest son, however my 10-year-old was interested in these and he had already learned a lot of them at school. He was however slightly mortified at the names of the male and female reproductive systems being shown as he didn’t think his brother should know about them yet!

Rating: 4/5

RRP: £15.99

This product can be purchased from Bright Minds here.