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Ask HN: How can I (easily) learn electronics with my son?

by pachico on 4/28/24, 4:56 PM with 9 comments

• by the__alchemist on 4/29/24, 3:28 PM

  Do projects. Ask your son what he thinks would be a fun thing to build. Assess its feasibility. Make it happen!

  As you've guessed, this is an accessible field, and there are a lot of entry points and sub-disciplines. Some thoughts:

    - Avoid batteries and anything higher than ~24 volts; keeps things safe given your son's age
    - Teach proper safety when handling chemicals like flux, and hot-temperature items like soldering equipment. Set up a well-ventilated environment, and make sure your son knows that inhaling fumes is dangerous long-term.
    - Don't use leaded solder (Fight me!)
    - Install KiCad. Let your son mess around with it, using your (Or even better: Documentation!) as an example. Order his creations from Shenzhen! They don't have to work. It will be very cool for him to make a fun-shaped PCB with a crazy silkscreen or copper drawing, some lights or w/e, and have it arrive 10 days later!
    - Get a dev board with an MCU of your choice, and teach your son to program int. STM32, ESP32 etc.

• by turtleyacht on 4/28/24, 6:02 PM

  Snap Circuits was fun. Tried to show "flow" of electrons.

  There is also Hayden Electricity One-Seven Series (revised 2e, ed. Harry Mileaf) (1978), but haven't started.

  Magnets make invisible forces concrete, and Legos help with problem decomposition.

• by cookiengineer on 4/29/24, 3:10 PM

  There's lots of arduino robot kits that you can use to build little toys with, and they are fairly easy to setup.

  "Makeblock" is a company that sells even easier kits where all sensorics are already integrated, similar to how the old Lego Mindstorms EV3 (31313) kit was built back in the day when it wasn't overcommercialized.

  I'd really recommend the makeblock stuff because it's better for both use cases: also with no programming necessary, just building and using their app to program/script it.

  In the workshops I'm doing at schools where the children don't have preliminary experience in coding, they can get motivated really fast. And the older groups (teenagers and up) rediscover the sets because they realize they also can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. In those workshops we were using the "Makeblock Ultimate 2.0" sets (which meanwhile aren't sold anymore in the EU, sadly), but maybe you can get lucky on eBay?

• by thorin on 4/29/24, 9:52 AM

  I used to play a lot with those electronics kits you got with springs to could fit wires into a board with "100 circuits for kids" or whatever. They were widely sold by RadioShack / Tandy in the 80s. 5 sounds way too young though and I don't think they would be that interested at that age. My kids school does something with bulbs, batteries, switches and buzzers for age 8 which seemed to go down OK. With all the distractions kids have at that age I think most will struggle to focus. I had a lot of time on my hands at that age, but even then I'd say the minimum age would be 6-8 to get involved much in electronics or programming. Learning to read well was a big factor I guess as I was mainly doing it myself.

  Microbit seemed to be a popular option a few years back, not sure if that is still around.

• by sircastor on 4/29/24, 2:16 PM

  Make:Electronics by Charles Platt. Is an excellent book, steps you through dozens of experiments to teach you why electricity behaves the way it does and how we’ve turned that into electronics.

• by BorisMelnik on 4/29/24, 9:15 PM

  what I've done with my kids, I have many. 5 is a bit young for electronics in my experince, their motor skills are still developing and are just learning to hold tools in their hand / pens pencils.

  I've gotten a lot of ads for electronic kits and I usually spend more time reading the directions and figuring it out than doing the actual project. I've done the ELEGOO kit from Amazon and that was a lot of fun. made lights blink, fans blow etc.

  -so many kits from LEGO! when you are doing building with the instructions you can modify what you built to do other things. this I think is the best way to go

  -start easy with replacing batteries in things. show them it doesn't work without batteries, then put in batteries and it works. show them different types of batteries.

  -take apart toys / fix toys. when something breaks, figure out why it breaks. it is usually a wire that needs to be soldered. that is really fun.

  -if you have something like power wheels for really little kids, you can get an upgrade kit to increase the power, that is REALLY fun.

  -get a rasp-pi kit from cana and build a retro pi. show them what USB ports are and how to plug things into USB. show them the parts of the computer.

  -rip apart a cable and show them what is inside.

  -show them how to pair a Bluetooth speaker / headphones.

  -introduce them to a proper mouse and keyboard and how to use it. gaming is a great way to do this, especially roblox/minecraft.

  The best possible thing you can do is anytime something breaks in your house is to help them fix it and be patient with them. be very patient and don't do it for them no matter what. show them how to do it, undo it and let them do it. last week I got some RFID stickers and showed them how to program a message with their iPad. they scan the Ipad and it says their name, or sends Mom/Dad a message. very fun! good luck!