I’m not satisfied with Snap Circuits. The 100/200/300-in-one kits I had as a kid actually said something about the circuits. The Snap Circuit approach of “Goal of the blah circuit: to use the blah” is dumbed down and thereby not helpful.

This makes the mistakes a bigger deal. Without giving any idea about how things are supposed to work, it’s pretty frustrating for kids to try to debug their constructions that don’t work, though I suppose they might argue that sneaking in a short circuit is a test to see whether the kids were paying attention. What is even worse is when the systematic component testing instructions are simply wrong. PNP and NPN transistors work differently, but you wouldn’t know it from their debugging guide… sigh 19i58u86s08rm.jpg

19i58u8imu0rm.jpg

Michael K Johnson March 22, 2014 17:24

The Elenco learn to solder kits are reasonably good. A few terms aren’t defined and it’s missing a few tips that I could fill in for my kids, but overall my 7yo went from no experience to being able to work independently in the course of a few hours of practice.

Overall, I’d say it’s good if the kids have someone who can help fill in the gaps. I do think that the heathkit soldering training kit I did as a kid was more thorough and better paced.

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable