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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?"
Kit it out with stuff that you're passionate about. Only then can they get your passions...
Depending on the ages in question, these are great toys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsela
They have little plastic spheres containing motors, reduction gears, worm gears, etc. You can build stuff from their designs, but it's even more fun just to build things of your own imagining.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there was a time where the majority of workers were involved in actually using these tools, and so it was normal to have an old set of them around the house. Nowadays, with globalization pushing most manual labor out of first world countries, high school kids who take metal shop are more likely to be familiar with manufacturing than their parents.
We live in the kind of world that Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick used to write about, where kids think meat comes "from the supermarket" cause they've never been on a farm and think cars are made by robots with no human hands involved.
Many young inventors are shocked to discover that you can't just design a part using CAD-CAM and email the design off to a factory in China to be mass produced.. that often even the most sophisticated computer controlled milling machine produces parts that you have to get out a file to finish.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Might as well...you know he'll already be on the DHS watch list just for the rockets and chemistry set.
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You should probably mention that the initial investment can reach the 1000 bucks easily. Unless you want some equipment that gives you more troubles than fun.
:)
Don't get me wrong, I like RC planes and it's a great hobby, my dad's the prez of the local club and we spend a good deal of my (and his) spare time there together. It's basically the only thing we have in common (him being a die hard conservative non-technical bureaucrat, me being a liberal computer geek... there ain't much we agree on but model planes), but be aware that it can be very quickly very expensive and time consuming. Not to mention that I wouldn't recommend it as a hobby for children under 12. It can be quite some time until you can handle a plane that is really "fun" to fly, the trainer planes certainly ain't much fun.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Legos, model rockets, heathkits, and chemistry sets were all big influences (and my son and I STILL launch model rockets).
A good low-cost way to develop mechanical skills and encourage curiosity about how things work is a basic set of hand tools and a pile of discarded appliances/electronics. Let the kids tear them apart, and maybe even find out what failed. If you are lucky enough to get hold of older electronics (before VLSI/ASICs took over), you can even scrounge enough useful parts to build your own circuits.
I trashpicked TV's for years as a kid, and eventually taught myself enough about electronics to fix and resell most of them, earning enough money to buy my first real set of electronic test gear (mostly Heathkits),and land a summer job as a bench tech at a local TV repair shop while most of my peers were flipping burgers or delivering pizzas.
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Can't do a lot anymore today. My dad used to build his own explosives. Even I got away with building a (working) flame thrower. Doing either of this today will at the very least land you on some governmental list (and not the nice kind), if not in jail.
If you can get your hand on the substances needed at all anymore. Regulations of explosives has really gone berserk, they now argue whether to outlaw ASA (ya know, the aspirin) because it can be used to create TNP.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I remember as a kid spending hundreds of hours with Edmunds stuff that my dad bought us.
A three stage water rocket, that was so cool; each stage would use up it's water/fuel, separate, and the next one would blast off. I think the final stage even deployed a parachute for effect. Nowadays, I think they might have a boring one-stage water rocket (I can make one of those out of a coke bottle, big deal.)
But the coolest kit was an optics kid with hundreds of parts; lenses, tubes, housings, photosensitive paper, and so on. It had plans for telescopes, microscopes, periscopes, and the final project was a full functioning SLR camera with zoom lens that worked! Truly amazing. I'd love to find a kit like that again for my kids (okay, okay, and me), but they don't seem to offer much like this any more. Sigh.
Even anticipating and reading their catalogue brought many hours of enjoyment each year.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.