Random rave: kudos to whomever designed/ wrote instructions for the newer battle packs.
We've been picking up the $9.99 "battle packs" that have been out for the last 1-2 years (going back to the 30th anniversery packaging). These are the ones that come with like 5 troopers and a mini-rig type custom design. We'd been building them with my oldest (he just had his 5th birthday), but he had always needed a fair amount of help...
Not so with the newer 8015 pack (IG-Assassin droids). The improvements are subtle, but very clever and very significant: fewer peices added per step, distinctive colors for the hidden, interior peices (obvious which peices are new in each step, easy to find from the pile), and there's even one step where a single-stud peice is added just to keep the correct spacing of other pieces obvious. It's not a simpler design, it's just designed with instruction-clarity in mind.
It all made a BIG difference (plus, I guess he's older now), and he was actually able to put the thing together unsupervised! Great experience.