Hi All,
I'm after a bit of advice, I'm from Cornwall, UK and we visited the At Bristol yesterday during holiday, my 8 year old boy who likes science found the electronics stand and we spent hours making circuits using crocodile clips and motors, the staff there were also very impressed when I showed him how to use two sets of batteries in Series to boost the power and by the end of it we had many motors, switches and buzzers, he loved it, I've never seen him so buzzing about something like this, coming from an IT background this was really nice to see.
He was gutted that the shop had nothing to take home so I said we would make a kit and get some components from Maplin or Amazon.
I was certain I wanted to go down the crocodile clip route mounting components of pieces of wood because the kits to be honest are really expensive and hide a lot of the stuff that's going on.
However in my search I've discovered breadboards and found kits on Amazon (link below) which makes me wonder if I would be better to go for a breadboard or crocodile clip everything.
One concern of mine, which is why I wanted to ask is breadboards seem to want a power supply unit, but I don't like the idea of letting him loose on anything that connects to a wall socket, I was hoping to do it via 2 or 4 1.5v battery packs, as I'm worried about short circuits which will of course happen, or will the power supply protect from that?
What's your thoughts? I've got a day off Thursday and I'm very keen to continue the work the science museum started whilst it's fresh, so don't want to wait for a china shipment but I'm also a bit limited on funds so was hoping to keep below the £20-£30 mark if possible, because of his age, buzzers, motors and lights are the thing to interest him rather than circuits but who knows where it will lead, I did electronics at secondary school but swapped to IT when it realised I was really rubbish at soldering on a circuit board, although I'll give it a go again.
Here is the link to that product on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product...act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1780XYQ9DFQM6
Thanks in advance.
I'm after a bit of advice, I'm from Cornwall, UK and we visited the At Bristol yesterday during holiday, my 8 year old boy who likes science found the electronics stand and we spent hours making circuits using crocodile clips and motors, the staff there were also very impressed when I showed him how to use two sets of batteries in Series to boost the power and by the end of it we had many motors, switches and buzzers, he loved it, I've never seen him so buzzing about something like this, coming from an IT background this was really nice to see.
He was gutted that the shop had nothing to take home so I said we would make a kit and get some components from Maplin or Amazon.
I was certain I wanted to go down the crocodile clip route mounting components of pieces of wood because the kits to be honest are really expensive and hide a lot of the stuff that's going on.
However in my search I've discovered breadboards and found kits on Amazon (link below) which makes me wonder if I would be better to go for a breadboard or crocodile clip everything.
One concern of mine, which is why I wanted to ask is breadboards seem to want a power supply unit, but I don't like the idea of letting him loose on anything that connects to a wall socket, I was hoping to do it via 2 or 4 1.5v battery packs, as I'm worried about short circuits which will of course happen, or will the power supply protect from that?
What's your thoughts? I've got a day off Thursday and I'm very keen to continue the work the science museum started whilst it's fresh, so don't want to wait for a china shipment but I'm also a bit limited on funds so was hoping to keep below the £20-£30 mark if possible, because of his age, buzzers, motors and lights are the thing to interest him rather than circuits but who knows where it will lead, I did electronics at secondary school but swapped to IT when it realised I was really rubbish at soldering on a circuit board, although I'll give it a go again.
Here is the link to that product on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product...act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1780XYQ9DFQM6
Thanks in advance.