Your Requirements, The only tool that we require you to have is a laptop or computer to program the HERO board and an internet connection to access the challenge. No screwdrivers, electric drills, or sharp hand tools needed for this kit! No soldering required!
Radio Shack is making a comeback. These are actually great kits from an educational standpoint. They allow learners to stand back and see the forest from the trees with a lot of fun applications for the age group.
What most people of old considered electronics is about as relevant as a chemistry set. That era has passed.
Incidentally the Radio Shack 60 watt iron is a solid iron, Taiwanese-made with an ATMega88 uP and TI precision op amps for the thermocouple sense. Truth in advertising it does seem to in fact be "exclusive to Radio Shack" and a custom design, not a knock-off of anything like a Hakko.
Some years ago I got a "100W" soldering gun from the Conrad shop in Berlin. Manufactured by Voltcraft, it was. I'd be surprised if it even put out as much as 20 Watts. Then it conked out altogether. Piece of junk it was - like just about everything else made by Voltcraft. IIRC they were a Polish outfit. Conrad was in all other respects a worthy retailer of electronic gear, but their stocking of Voltcraft crap did their rep no favours.
When I was growing up, boys of a certain age (myself included) were drawn like moths to a flame to make their own explosives. I nailed most of them without too much difficulty - propellent grade anyway - but nitroglycerine defeated me. I was using concentrated nitric acid which is way too weak at only ~70% and didn't understand the importance of sulphuric acid to the nitration reaction back then. In retrospect that was lucky for me, as I would no doubt not be typing this today if I'd been a little more clued-up at the time. I imagine it must be seriously challenging to type anything on a keyboard with no hands.
I still have several 40+ year old Wellers that I am fond of -- where I can use them.
Otherwise, the 35 (?) year old Leister (sp?) does the trick.
But, I'm increasingly walking away from even prototyping (assembly) boards, myself -- much cheaper to let someone else do it and spend my time on "higher value" activities (esp when the prototype quantity is dozens to hundreds -- who the hell wants to be a line worker?? :< )
A couple of friends of mine made nitroglycerine, and couldn't set it off. They left it on the window sill for a couple of days - apparently long enough to photo-decompose some of it into something easier to detonate - before throwing it out onto the compost heap, where it detonated spectacularly, but far enough away not to hurt anybody.
The only story I heard about the unfortunate consequences of playing with gun-powder (from one of my father's contacts in Europe) was about somebody who destroyed his eyesight. Braille worked for him.
The old weller stuff was real simple and really reliable. It's probably still OK if the're making them in mexico with the old tooling and designs.
How much time and hand-holding does it take to get an assembly house to make basic boards or assemblies? Especially going over stuff like how to bend leads on stuff like a to220 case or whatever stuff might be going on?
The thing that stands out most from what you've shown us here is how things have been so massively dumbed-down over the last 50 years. The up to date project kits are way simpler than the 1976 kit. I guess it's symptomatic of society as a whole and if you're going to have a policy of 'no child left behind' then the speed at which children learn will be dictated by the slowest students in the class. The corollary of that will be that many of the brightest kids will despair at being held back, lose all interest and maybe even drop out altogether.
It's more that modern technology allows the kit to be concentrated on educating the kids about the subject of interest without making unreasonable demands on their mechanical skills and manual dexterity.
They may make fewer demands on the kid. The components are likjely to be a good deal more complicated.
If you don't bother to treat different children differently. Good teachers can do that, if class sizes are kept small. Big schools can stream the students by ability and match the tasks to the average ability of the students in a particular class.
I spent a lot of my time in primary school being bored out of my mind. Secondary school wasn't much better. Under-graduate university education did get more interesting.
My primary and secondary education wasn't a good preparation for university, but I'd done enough reading outside of school to be well-placed to exploit the university environment. There was a study at Melbourne University in 1950's that identified the number of books in the parental home as the best single indicator of success at university, with a relative who had been to university as the next best. My parent's house was full of books, and both my parents had been through university, and both of my mother's siblings.
My father's sister didn't, but she ended up marrying a very clever veterinarian who ended up with a D.Sc. and at one point both their kids were professors at the University of Adelaide, not that either of them stayed there long.
If you lack that kind of background, adapting to university can be difficult. Phil Allison seemed to do well at school, but didn't find the university environment congenial.
If I were in the USA I would make sure my kids were proficient in pin yin at age 10 (when it becomes harder to learn a new language) I would let them browse Chinese websites and explain the toys available. Then I would order those that I approve of.
They could look forward to a nice carrier in the US military or to being eligible to the Chinese administration for a green card (whatever applies).
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