[Elecraft] OT - kits for young kids?

[Don Wilhelm]

Glenn,

My two grandsons had a soldering iron in their hands at about the same 
age as your son.  With a little instruction about the proper technique 
(heat both the lead and the solder pad, along with instruction about not 
using a big blob of solder), they both were successful at it.  One 
showed no further interest in building anything electronic, but the 
other is going at it with a passion - he is into not only building kits 
but creating his own circuit boards and his own trials at "how things 
work" - he is now 15 and has accompanied me to Dayton for the last 2 
years.  His call is KJ4NYI, and has made a lot of ham radio friends in 
the process.  He is also taking some of my old junk off my hands to 
experiment with.  He still has not figured out how to make his radio 
controlled submarine re-surface, but he knows how to sink it :-)

So let your son have a try at soldering, then introduce him to some 
relatively easy kits.  My grandson has had a lot of fun building some of 
the QRPme kits - they are easy (but he may need some help with the 
instructions - sometimes sparse).  At that age, they can get excited 
about most anything that appeals to them, let him experiment a bit to 
see where he will eventually fit in the world.

73,
Don W3FPR

On 11/21/2011 3:40 PM, ON4WIX wrote:
> Hi group,
>
> My oldest son, nearing his seventh birthday, has for the past few years
> been interested in those radio things sitting on my desk, bleeping away.
> > From time to time he seems to enjoy tuning around the bands in search of
> all those strange noises from far away and mysterious places.
> Today he asked me if I could teach him to build some stuff like he had
> me seen build (or rather -  put together) so many times before.
> Of course, considering his age soldering is still out of the question.
> I've googled around a bit and apparently there are quite a few kids'
> electronic assembly kits around, but almost all of them require
> soldering skills. As an example, here's a kit offered by Einstein's
> Toolbox: http://www.einsteinstoolbox.com/learn-to-solder-kit.html
> So, my question to this knowledgeable group is this: are any of you
> aware of electronics teaching kits aimed at the 7-10 yo age group? I'd
> think these would be some sort of breadboard assembly kind of kits,
> using spring-tension terminals to build some nifty projects like sirens,
> chaser lights, maybe an Xtal receiver (although medium wave has become
> rather quiet over here in EU)...
>