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A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?
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?"
Get them into remote control aircraft when they're old enough. It's not a cheap hobby, a few hundred dollars to get into it, but you get to learn about:
- Combustion engines
- Mixing fuel (some chemistry)
- Radio gear
- Flight dynamics
- Assembling and building, where care is needed to avoid major mistakes that would render the model unflyable
- Woodwork and metal work (and you'll aquire the tools for these if you don't already have them)
- The importance of measurement in the real world
- Importance of safety and developing good practice and procedure to make things safe
If you go with the above, make sure you join a club and practice on a simulator as it does take quite some time for most people to get the hang of controlling a plane and nothing will cause a child to lose interest quicker than a toy that takes a month to build and breaks (crashes) in under a minute. It's definitely harder than r/c cars which don't fall out of the sky if you slow down too much, aren't affected by the wind etc. (In fact petrol engine cars - not the $10 toys - are a simpler alternative with less of a learning curve BUT there isn't as much reward either).
Also when they're old enough, you could get them to build a dobsonian telescope. It's not particularly difficult, and you can choose to do it from components. Again you learn about woodwork and metal work, but also add optics and astronomy to the mix.
The point is that while the above are in a sense toys, in another they are not. You have to be rigid and disciplined because you are creating a real working piece of equipment where tolerances are important. Kids unfortunately grow up in a schooling environment today where they are taught whatever they do will be just fine. Great for the child's confidence, but the trouble is that's not how the real world works.
These hobbies aren't something they can't be left to do unsupervised - you'll actually have to learn yourself and help teach them. You might even end up doing classes together (telescope making), or taking tution together (learning to fly r/c). It does require that the child can follow direction, has some patience and doesn't just lose interest in a week. They also have to be interested in the end product or they won't want to do it.
The other thing that should be obvious to people here if you like the idea of building things together is to teach them to build a computer from scratch. That's actually a practical skill they can use whether or not they wind up in IT.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Get a subscription to Make magazine. Also, check out some of their kits. http://www.makershed.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=20
I just ordered a 10lb package of Potassium Nitrate and 115' of fuse with no issues on eBay last month. Plenty of other chemicals easily available there, too.