Back in the old days Radioshack used to sell hobbyist kits to learn electronics on. What are some good modern equivalents?
The target audience is primarily an 8-year-old, but if adults – namely me 
– can enjoy it too, so much the better!
Right now I’m looking at something like Snap Circuits, which is nice because it skips the tedium of wire stripping and soldering while still teaching circuitry. But is that a bad idea?
Any other kits you might recommend?
Radio Shack has something similar with the Snap Kit. That’s about right for an 8 year old. If you know something about electronics already they still have Breadboardsthat are easy to assemble basic circuits with. You may have to order them, the stores don’t carry much of that stuff anymore. With a few components and jumpers you can do a lot with the bread boards without getting into stripping and soldering. I still use them to throw together simple stuff.
It looks like you can get the old 160-in-one kits (or 50-in-one or 200-in-one or whatever; I think 160 was the one I had) with the spring connectors from eBay. Snap Circuits doesn’t look bad, but it looks like you’d be restricted to projects much simpler than the old kits.
Man, if only I still remembered everything I learned from those kits…
Look at the Ramsey Electronics site. I had several of the 100 in 1 type kits from Radio Shack, and this one, in particular, looks like it would fit right in with them.
Cool, thanks for the advice, all!
It looks like the snap circuit and the 130-in-1 lab are all made by the same company (Elenco) and then probably OEMed out to Ramsey and Radioshack. Either one seems great, and it’s hard to choose. I think I’m going to start with the Snap Circuits Green because it has more moving parts (and a fuel cell!), and then the 130-in-1 lab would be great if this one holds her attention long enough and she wants to see how it works in the “real world”.
Breadboards – I don’t even know what they are. Is it basically a grid of electrically interconnected squares put into a convenient package? So you can combine wires together without having to solder or twist them? By itself I wouldn’t know what to do with one of those, but if there any educational kits (with a curriculum), that’d be really cool too. The company that makes Snap Circuits and the 130 lab makes breadboard kits too, but apparently they’re just for prototyping and don’t come with fancy educational materials and blinky, moving things.
My daughter is 8 and while she doesn’t have any interest in that kind of stuff (yet) I’ll probably get her something like it at some point. When I was younger I had the one with all the springs. I believe this was the exact kit. While I’ve never used those Snap kits, I’ve seen them and I don’t really care for them. I think the spring ones came with pre stripped wires and I liked those ones much more. It was a lot easier to experiment with them since they weren’t ‘modular’. You could do what they told you to do to build specific things or you could move the wires off to other springs to see what would happen. Also, ISTM with the wires, it just looks like the electricity is easier to follow then it is with those Snap Kits. Again, I haven’t looked at them closely yet, but just glancing at the box, they look a bit confusing.
Also, on top of everything else, when she gets older and something breaks, a light fixture, a vacuum cleaner, a fridge and you take the case off. It’s a nest of wires, not a bunch of snapped together pieces of plastic.
Here’s an Instructables introduction to breadboards. There are a lot of materials out there for specific circuits you can build. It makes the wiring easy and a lot of components like ICs, resistors, transistors, capacitors, etc. just plug into the little holes. You need a power supply, but a few batteries are sufficient for most things. After you learn some basic things about electronics it’s the next step up.
Breadboards are great for intermediate electronics junkies! I fab my own PCBs now, but I still use breadboards all the time for prototyping. Here’s one current example. You can see that the wires just poke right into the holes. On the right (blue board) is an Arduino Nano. Arduinos are fun little units that allow interfacing with all kinds of things, and have a USB interface. In the middle (green board) is a high-precision analog-to-digital converter (ADC). It takes an input voltage and converts to a serial data format (I2C) that the Arduino inputs (Arduinos have their own ADC but it’s lower precision). And on the left is a little constant-current source that the project also needs.
As you can see, there’s no soldering needed. You can also poke your voltmeter right onto the ends of the wires, or you can clip to jumper leads and poke them in.
I was coming in to recommend Snap Circuits. Fang had gotten a kit from his Aunt a couple of years ago. He still builds things with it at nearly eleven.
If there’s a MicroCenter near you they actually have an area for hobbyist electronic type stuff- kind of a spiritual successor to radio shack. Both “old fashioned” project type stuff and “new fangled” Arduino stuff and more science fair type things like miniature solar cells and wind turbines.
LittleBits looks good, if pricey, but I have no experience with it.
