8th grade is old enough to do just about anything. I like to do big memorable projects with my kid where we both have to learn some things along the way. I’d build a go kart at this age, or some other electric motor driven vehicle. I’d think it would span a few months depending on time dedicated. And covers mechanical, fabrication, components and even some programming if you want to tune it yourself.
Also, I like to reinforce the concept of “dreaming it up”, tell my kids to think of a thing to make and we break down the steps we think are needed to build it. At first, it’s like their imagination wasn’t big enough. They’d have an idea and I’d show them how we could build it pretty easily. Now, it’s gotten to where they know the skies the limit and anything of kind of possible so they start big and then work their way back down to a realistic scope of features. All to say, ask your kid what they want to build!
I loved doing chemistry experiments and demos at home as a kid. I had books like the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments [1] but this is a modern guide that I would gladly recommend:
Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson
This book is an absolute classic. I've got a hardback copy from my childhood and doing the experiments as a kid was magical. Nowadays most other chem experiment books are watered down because the old stuff could be quite hazardous and getting some of the reagents is a lot harder without a parent who can order from Sigma Aldrich.
I've got a decent number of scars and even some chemically induced skin discoloration from those days. The book itself is quite valuable now.
Thank you for the great suggestion! There is a book on Forensic Science experiments too that I have ordered. Are you aware of similar books on Electronics too? Internet is awash with DIY tutorials but nothing beats a structured book to learn the basics of things.
GNU radio is an awesome signal processing toolkit. You can use it to take signals from a cheap RTLsdr, or even a microphone, and make new virtual instruments, radios, etc. Long ago I was interested in aircraft navigation aids, and was able to throw together a receiver for the local VOR transmitter, which showed me on screen where I was relative to the transmitter.
You could build a sonar system, listen to ultrasound, or almost anything you can imagine, thanks to Moore's law and the massive amount of compute we have these days.
That sums up the internet for me, constant feeling of not doing enough to get your kids ahead and personally not amounting to anything because everything has been done better than you can do it.
hi, I waited for this thread to die down and reach the second page before I posted this because I love this topic and didn't want it derailed with a sensitive issue. I didn't realize this was restricted to school age kids and wanted to sign up as I needed some motivation to start on a game. But I reached the pronoun combobox and was legitimately confused!
I used to have a passion for UX and read books like "Don't make me think" and here I was stumbling with this silly field and didn't complete the form. Instead I was googling about pronouns to see if I should select "he/him", "he/him/his", or "He/Him". I didn't even notice there was an "any" and "other" value until I started writing this comment!
Hope you don't mind the question. This is a serious Q as I'm responsible for the UX of a public facing application and might at some point be required to add this field to our pages. I find it odd and kind of against UX best practices to make the field required. And presenting so many similar options "made me think" which used to be considered a bad practice because it's an obstacle to users completing a form. I now realize the target audience is school age kids. Do they automatically know what to select? I'm a xennial that somehow went into some time freeze spending every second of the day raising two kids with little time for social media. So please excuse my ignorance.
I know there's no correct answer. But I legit wanted to understand what my answer actually means and why we are presenting seemingly duplicate options. I tried googling "capital he him pronoun" and all the references were about god. From a UX point of view, we tried to eliminate non essential questions like "choose 3 items that interest you" from forms years ago. There's also no correct answer for that but some users drop off sign ups when they're forced to answer too my fields. And that's kind of what happened to me here. Sorry if this seems silly or nitpicky!
HackClub is very, very cool. My son just got a envelope from you a couple days ago, Zach. Keep up the good work, and see if you can slip in a couple extra of your extremely cool stickers for me next time. :-) (Currently rocking Hack to the Future on my laptop)
I've had an Ender 3 for 5 years and just got a Bambu P1S, and it's amazing how far things have progressed. The Bambu is just a workhorse, I currently have it printing Christmas ornaments to give the extended family. Where the Ender I would shy away from things unless I REALLY needed them, because I knew I'd have to spend time screwing around, the Bambu basically just works.
I bought the Ender for my son, and he put it together and helped me do some mods to it and print some things, but after about 3 months he never touched it again. Just gave it to his school when I got the Bambu.
The A1 seems to be quite a capable little printer.
Beyond just printing things you find online, learning CAD is a really fun way of turning ideas into tangible objects.
Same here. Now I have an A1 + A1 mini too. It's amazing. This is what I dreamed of when I built my first RepRap. I did get me Ender 3 working eventually but the print quality isn't as good as any of the Bambu printers and it's super slow.
The new CoreXY Prusa One is also a very good buy when it comes out but the A1/A1 mini in particular are just such a good deal at the moment.
I'd recommend getting a prusa kit for anyone interested in building stuff. The instructions are easy to follow and broken up nicely. IMO it's also fun to see the parts and a glimpse of the design you wouldn't see buying a complete printer.
I feel like its best to have a project first where you need 3d printing and then buy a printer. Just getting a printer in and of itself is kinda boring after finding some random crap on thingiverse and printing it out.
You can have a lot of fun with a tiny traffic light using an Arduino and three different color lights. There are bunch of things you can do to build on it.
It might be a good idea to discover what your kid is really interested in. It is a common trap for adults to project their unfulfilled childhood desires onto their children. It used to be fathers buying and building model railways which the kid ignores and chooses to go outside and play football.
One of my kids explicitly said that he really didn't care what we did, he just wanted to spend time with me. Which reminds me that we haven't done that much together since the summer ended...
Keep it simple. I think your examples might be too advanced. Failing is boring.
You know these 'sticks' that you hold an ice cream with?
Bend those into a propeller. Wet them with water if they crack. Drill a hole (or cut with knife) through the middle and put it on a small electric motor and attach a battery or power source. Spin it up and watch the propeller fly off.
Just give him or her the things and say the goal. And that you don't know if it will work. The hard part is figuring out to bend with water and to get the right fit on the hole to the axis.
Unfortunately, my limited (geographically-constrained) contact with my nieces and nephews has severely impacted my ability to influence them towards technology. :(
Exposure is one thing that is helpful, but in the end, you have to find something that your son is so enthralled with that he wants to pursue it on his own. It begins with curiosity about something, of course, but ultimately requires him to develop the skills and then the confidence to where he wants to begin doing things on his own.
The problem is in the things that parents subject their children to that actually drive the children away from those things... like piano lessons! (I say this as a pianist that has taught many children over the years, and it's obvious which kids are being forced.)
We did this and our girls enjoyed them, but I found it doesn't really teach much. It's mostly a "can you follow simple instructions" task.
I feel like having them complete simple breadboarding / soldering projects where they are actually seeing how things work at a pretty low level and developing a physical skill was more valuable - or get them going on simple Rasp Pi projects if they have an interest in programming.
KiwiCo's Tinker Crate is one of the best parenting moves I ever made. I thought the older kid would like it more but the younger one really took to it.
My kiddo has a couple of those, and I'm still in two minds about some of the choices that they provide in those kits.
It feels a little like "Follow these instructions exactly" without requiring understanding in a lot of cases. For example, the music IC doesn't have any of it's terminals labelled.
The same with the transistor; it doesn't seem to explain exactly why you'd need to use it, why you'd need a resistor on the base, etc. On that note, It's also possible to potentially damage stuff if you just try to experiment without understanding.
I feel like they could have made some of the parts a bit more flexible -- have current limiting resistors built into the LED & transistor units for example, provide point-to-point wires rather than rigid 1/2/3 unit connectors, etc etc.
I had one of those when I was maybe 8. Got some enjoyment out of it, and then a couple years later I got RadioShack's Electronic Learning Lab, which was much more advanced. After receiving and opening it, I was actually in tears (IIRC) because it looked so complicated and I didn't even know how to get a wire into the breadboard.
That ELL gave me probably 100s of hours of fun and learning over the next 5 years.
Around that age I built a trebuchet. Did calculations, got some plywood and building lumber, etc. Had a lot of fun chucking water balloons down a hill.
I'm a really big fan of the more modern way of doing things.
A lot of old school maker projects are fun, but they're also basically E waste making kits now that phones do almost everything.
Not having a bunch of low tech gadgets laying around is really nice, they can easily become the biggest clutter challenge in a space, the same way paper used to back when more people still used it for things other than books.
Building a small solar energy system is fun and easy, and also practical.
3D printing is fantastic.
Meshtastic has a lot of DIY and learning potential and is like the lite edition of ham radio. What's really cool is that range testing gets you outside.
Maybe design something together with JLCPCB and have it made(Leave off any through hole connectors and solder them yourself for both fun and pretty decent cost savings).
The prices change every 5 minutes for sales and such, but there's generally always a ton of 50 cents a watt solar panels on Amazon.
Permanent installs that work unattended are slightly scary and have to be done right so something doesn't leak or start a fire, but the portable folding panels are usually similarly cheap.
You could get one of those plus a charge controller and LiFePo4 for not too much.
Everything still needs to be done carefully though, and unfortunately almost all cheap charge controllers have a ton of idle power draw, they're kinda crappy compared to the tech built into a random cheap solar generator, I don't think you can make anything as nice as a commercial generator for cheap.
Most the DIY education kits for kids type stuff seem pretty crappy too.
An ESP32 module with onboard lithium charging plus a USB-C folding panel has a lot of possibilities though, if you have any projects ideas that could be done with such things.
Building a computer from the components. Bicycle maintenance and/or building a bicycle from the components. Building a skateboard. Car maintenance. Doing a project in your house, like installing a new toilet.
I can think of a million things, but ask him what he's interested in doing.
My father is an electrical engineer. Growing up, he had countless components in the basement, including a whole slew of 7400-series DIP chips, as well as a bunch of (powered) breadboards and spare wire. In highschool I had so so much fun building things from scratch - I recall building a basic adder by drawing out the truth tables and doing boolean algebra to come up with the circuit diagram, eventually evolving it into a more fully-fledged calculator. It felt (and still feels) like magic! Most of it was self-directed, though I certainly got his help in a lot of places.
I think sort of "choose your own adventure" projects like that are great, and they also force you to really understand everything you're doing. You can also scale the scope of the "project" to whatever you want; it can even be a sort of iterative process. More importantly (imo) you're left with a bunch of components that he can tinker around with endlessly :)
I so miss the basements of my midwest youth and early adulthood. They were the place for projects. I built so much. My west coast home since 2010 doesn't have a basement, and we've not much interior space for projects (esp when you're talking construction, tools, soldering and such). My spouse is stickler about the inside staying nice, too. The garage is the alternative, but it's so inferior. There's a car there, it's cold, etc. Oh for a basement...
Living in the Northeast, my basement flooded last winter and now my radon levels are through the roof. However, I can't mitigate them because of the French drain I have there! So basements aren't always that great, at least in my area.
Adafruit has loads of projects and kits like TV-Be-Gone, Circuit Playground, EdgeBadge and others. They're suitable for a range of ages and experience levels, usually come with lesson materials and are generally pretty affordable.
I believe SparkFun has a similar ecosystem of products and projects as well.
I'm not affiliated with either of these companies.
Aolean harp! I'm planning a workshop for kids around this now: build the harp & resonator however you like (two flower pots with a piece of fishing line in between for example -- more ideas here: https://www.homemade-dessert-recipes.com/aeolian-harp.html) then add a contact mic to the resonator and do some simple digital processing (delays and phase shifts) on the waveforms to demonstrate signal arithmetic and the basics of acoustics.
There are a lot of these simple soldering projects out there.
Our daughters completed a few. At a minimum, they now know how to solder and have an appreciation for electrical components. That was all I was hoping for at such a young age.
Should either ever decide to study electrical engineering, I feel they will be less intimidated having had this experience.
Fpv, my kid didn’t care about the sdr rtl plus it doesn’t actually do any interesting frequencies. Everything interesting is 1ghz and above these days
For the drone I just bought the parts over time and one day he asked if he could put it all to put it all together. It was a bit of a bitch debugging his mistakes but I’m glad he took an interest and applied himself
Buy a $20 RC car off Amazon and replace the radio receiver with a raspberry pi for a quick and dirty driverless car platform. Might have to do some surgery to reuse the motor drivers or you might have to add your own, but it's generally not too bad.
Not quite the same, but if you've a leaf blower, then making a hovercraft with a couple of pool noodles and a circular piece of plywood is pretty cool (and a lot of fun).
Sometimes a 13 year old kid just wants to be a kid. I know because I was robbed of that, thanks to the adults in my life growing up. Let your kid discover whatever it is that they are into, on their own.
Are you saying just let them figure it out on their own?
I prefer to give my kids opportunities in things they wouldn't otherwise have known about, or had the resources to discover. They can then decide if thats something they want to go deeper on.
This notion of "let kids be kids" minimizes their development needs and exposure to important learning experiences.
You'll need to buy an eyepiece or two, and hardware, bolts, etc, but everything else can be made or 3d printed.
I designed and made, with my kids, a 76mm 'cheapscope' using PVC pipe, 3d-printed mirror-holder, spider. focuser and camera-tripod connector, here: https://imgur.com/a/cheapscope-4KtPgoN
I meant to post the 3d-print designs but haven't got to it, let me know if you're interested.
For sure it's not the best scope (or design) ever (and the 3d prints warped a bit), and no phone/camera eyepiece mount so the pictures are shaky, but it works, it was fun, and opens up a new world(s).
Also, I like to reinforce the concept of “dreaming it up”, tell my kids to think of a thing to make and we break down the steps we think are needed to build it. At first, it’s like their imagination wasn’t big enough. They’d have an idea and I’d show them how we could build it pretty easily. Now, it’s gotten to where they know the skies the limit and anything of kind of possible so they start big and then work their way back down to a realistic scope of features. All to say, ask your kid what they want to build!
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