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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday October 13 2016, @04:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-off-video-games dept.

Hi folks,

As much as I loath the winters in New England here is where I'll be. Outdoor activities, while doable, can only be for short periods of time. Therefore I'm looking for projects that can be completed indoors that are interesting and take 6 months to complete. :) (Long winters up here...)

My son has shown an interest in both electronic and mechanical type projects. He'd like a hammer for his birthday so he can break rocks. Cool, geologist. Can't find rocks too well under the snow and ice, sand and salt, in the wintertime.

He'd also like an electronics kit but I'm not sure what to to get him that will last a long while. I think at this point he's more interested in building something, electronic or not, rather than learning theory. He often mentions robots but to get something that would last for months would cost me more than the budget allows.

I'd certainly appreciate suggestions and I'm sure there are other parents who might benefit from your experiences!


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  • (Score: 2) by Zinho on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:25PM

    by Zinho (759) on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:25PM (#414047)

    There are still 200-in-one electronic kits available like you used to buy at Radio Shack, currently sold by a company called Elenco. [elenco.com] Your local Fry's may carry it, or just look it up on Amazon [amazon.com] (probably easier). If you're lucky you may find one at a yard sale, and the components won't all be burned out :D

    It's how I cut my teeth on circuitry, and after a childhood of playing with one of these I was amazed at how hard it was for my fellow engineering students at University to grasp fundamentals like "all connected wire segments are on the same node". It seemed obvious to me, but my fellow scholars hadn't all spent their childhood summers figuring out how to build a circuit after siblings had lost half of the wires :P

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