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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

We (I am Dove's husband) have 2 other children. The 7 year old builds electric circuits (takes after his grandpa who worked for NASA and HP before becoming a pastor), and the 2 year old mostly makes engine noises while driving his monster trucks around the living room.

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The seven year old can make an electric motor out of spare parts (batteries, magnets, wires), and routinely makes electromechanical Minecraft contraptions that I don't comprehend.

We just hope they choose to use their powers for good.

My 7 y.o. can explain a motor but we haven't tried building one, I was eyeing him sets online and was between a few. I built him a loop in MineCraft redstone to power his randomly-timed spooky lights in his "the backrooms" (SCP), but I don't know how to use the newer redstone stuff and haven't found a (educational) use-case to built him anything with the redstone torch/NOT logic gate etc.

Mine started with homopolar motors! They're fun and easy and great kid-level physics and engineering.

I can also recommend Snap Circuits for Christmas. :)

My thirteen-year-old got tangled up in his dress shirt the other day.

Can I say it one more time? Get him building eurorack modules. It's like legos for sound. So many possible combinations! Everything is voltage controlled, so the output of anything can be inputs for anything.

And you get to build lots of cool circuits. Designing your own isn't hard, you can get really far with just op-amps and resistor/capacitor circuits.

some of the resistors are potometers, of course. So you have some knobs to turn.

But it is usually bog-standard chips. op-amp, simple gates, 8-bit buffers.

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