A Home Lab/Shop For Kids? 291
sharp-bang writes "When I was growing up, my Dad let my brother and I have the run of his wood shop, and kept up a steady stream of Lego kits, Estes model rockets, chemistry sets, Heathkit projects, and other fun science stuff from the Edmund Scientific catalog, and the rest was history. I'd like to give my kids that kind of experience. If your kids were interested in science, computers, robots, and building stuff, how would you build and outfit a lab/shop for them (and you) to play in?"
Most importantly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Most importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm ... I have to disagree. First find out what they're passionate about (if anything at this age). If they're young enough to be undecided, then you can go with what you like--but be prepared to completely change course if they discover something else.
My dad is an industrial engineer, so I got the whole math/science schtick, with a Heathkit computer and lots of stuff to build. However, when I turned 10, I turned on to music. Music is still a passion of mine ... but unfortunately, Dad didn't understand how I felt about it, so he was still pushing for the hard sciences. I never even learned to read standard notation, much less the music theory I wanted to take in high school.
Needless to say, this caused some friction, and to this day my passion for music is a lot greater than my knowledge for music.
Capsela (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsela [wikipedia.org]
They have little plastic spheres containing motors, reduction gears, worm gears, etc. You can build stuff from their designs, but it's even more fun just to build things of your own imagining.
What did your dad do? (Score:5, Insightful)
We live in the kind of world that Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick used to write about, where kids think meat comes "from the supermarket" cause they've never been on a farm and think cars are made by robots with no human hands involved.
Many young inventors are shocked to discover that you can't just design a part using CAD-CAM and email the design off to a factory in China to be mass produced.. that often even the most sophisticated computer controlled milling machine produces parts that you have to get out a file to finish.
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
Give them some catalogs (Edmund, Estes, Allelectronics, Smarthome, etc.) and see what floats their boats. I think I'd try and start them with something that sparked their interest, and in the course of exploring with them and 'guiding' their early efforts, I'd answer their questions about the hobbies I was passionate about. I joined a local model rocketry club in 9th grade, and attended meetings a few times a month. We were involved in regional competitions - parents took turns schlepping us around to weekend meets a few times a year.
At a minimum, you need a hobbyist (clean) jawvise, flat and sturdy cutting surface, setting gluding surface(s), someplace to sand stuff, good lighting. Basic tools, like X-Acto handles and blades, steel rule, smallish drivers. Over time, I added a Dremel and specialty tools I saw others using. For electronics tools, a low-wattage soldering iron, a DVM, needlenose pliers, hand tools, desoldering tools, and some fun kits to start. Even before the kits, something simple to practice soldering and desoldering, to learn how not to fry components (always my gumption trap).
Re:Older kids build stuff - R/C aircraft, telescop (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I like RC planes and it's a great hobby, my dad's the prez of the local club and we spend a good deal of my (and his) spare time there together. It's basically the only thing we have in common (him being a die hard conservative non-technical bureaucrat, me being a liberal computer geek... there ain't much we agree on but model planes), but be aware that it can be very quickly very expensive and time consuming. Not to mention that I wouldn't recommend it as a hobby for children under 12. It can be quite some time until you can handle a plane that is really "fun" to fly, the trainer planes certainly ain't much fun.
Re:Most importantly (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like my childhood, pretty much.... (Score:5, Insightful)
A good low-cost way to develop mechanical skills and encourage curiosity about how things work is a basic set of hand tools and a pile of discarded appliances/electronics. Let the kids tear them apart, and maybe even find out what failed. If you are lucky enough to get hold of older electronics (before VLSI/ASICs took over), you can even scrounge enough useful parts to build your own circuits.
I trashpicked TV's for years as a kid, and eventually taught myself enough about electronics to fix and resell most of them, earning enough money to buy my first real set of electronic test gear (mostly Heathkits),and land a summer job as a bench tech at a local TV repair shop while most of my peers were flipping burgers or delivering pizzas.
Re:Don't laugh (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can get your hand on the substances needed at all anymore. Regulations of explosives has really gone berserk, they now argue whether to outlaw ASA (ya know, the aspirin) because it can be used to create TNP.
Re:Most importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
That's key. Even though parents know what's "best", a lot of being young is exploration unhindered by authority breathing down one's back. Doing stuff with mom or pop can be fun, but there are constraints. Some children don't want to be babied but it helps to have a parent in the know if a question does arise. YMMV.
Re:What did your dad do? (Score:3, Insightful)
When your parts come back different to your spec, try to get a refund.
Re:Most importantly (Score:4, Insightful)
It can hardly be described as a passion if it lacks the strength to motivate you to educate yourself.
Edmunds/Efston used to rock. (Score:4, Insightful)
A three stage water rocket, that was so cool; each stage would use up it's water/fuel, separate, and the next one would blast off. I think the final stage even deployed a parachute for effect. Nowadays, I think they might have a boring one-stage water rocket (I can make one of those out of a coke bottle, big deal.)
But the coolest kit was an optics kid with hundreds of parts; lenses, tubes, housings, photosensitive paper, and so on. It had plans for telescopes, microscopes, periscopes, and the final project was a full functioning SLR camera with zoom lens that worked! Truly amazing. I'd love to find a kit like that again for my kids (okay, okay, and me), but they don't seem to offer much like this any more. Sigh.
Even anticipating and reading their catalogue brought many hours of enjoyment each year.
Re:Most importantly (Score:2, Insightful)