Thoughts on monthly kits for learning electronics with a companion learning app?

Hi, my name’s Oscar. I’ve been messing around with electronics for most of my life (early 30s) and have served as a robotics mentor for both students and adults. A couple buddies of mine (Dave, Mike) and I have been kicking around ideas for making learning electronics more accessible and fun for a while now.

The idea that we came up with is http://www.thimble.io. We want to motivate folks to learn and build electronics by featuring a different kit each month. The first one is a 2-wheel wifi robot. It is built around a laser-cut platform and arduino-derivative PCB I designed. (Featuring the popular esp8266 wifi module and a motor controller).

We started with the idea of virtual hackathons where we’d send everyone the same base kit and host a competition to see who performs the best (ie: which robot goes through a pre-designed course the fastest, who solves the problem the most interesting way, creativity, etc).

But, as we started talking to folks at Makercon, Makerfaire, etc. we also realized that most people we talked to want kits and a guided way to learn.

The basic idea is you get a kit delivered to your house once a month (or every other month if you want), you can use the learning app for any part you’re unfamiliar with and use it to guide you through the build. If you’re ambitious or more advanced, you can add additional sensors and functionality and enter your build into our monthly contests with prizes awarded by a unique panel of judges.

If this is interesting to you, we’d love to know your background in electronics (beginner, expert, etc)? What kind of kits would you like to see? What are your objectives from the kits? Any more feedback you have or questions are appreciated.

We're eager for feedback, so if you have any questions for us about this project or even the experience of working on a hardware startup, just ask.

Thanks!