Yesterday, I went along with my local hackerspace to a STEAM festival. We had one group that were selling laser-cut trinkets and demonstrating the use of a laser cutter, and the other group teaching people to solder. I was with the latter group.
We had kids as young as 4 or 5 learning to solder (with their parent's supervision), and plenty of kids maybe a hand-full of years older doing it solo. We also had our share of adults.
Here is one of my Wife's a friends who just happened to be passing. Along with her sister, they learned the dark art of soldering. (She is also demonstrating the use of safety equipment). They took their small boards with a couple of resistors soldered on them to make into pendants!
I was continually amazed at how well children under the age of 7 could pick up soldering -- and do repeatedly good solder joints. It was a little daunting giving them full control of a soldering iron, but nobody managed to burn themselves.
After learning to solder, several people bought a cheap kit and built either an electronic dice or a LED clock.
We were also visited by a pair of aliens looking for something pink to repair their space-ship. We offered to teach them to solder, but they declined after we indicated we did not have any pink solder.
Oh, I forgot to mention that we had a third group who were setting off liquid nitrogen explosions in buckets of ping pong balls (throwing them 10 to 15 metres into the air), crushing 44 Gal (200 litre) steel drums, and blowing things up with 4000A pulses of current from a 2.5 kV capacitor array (called "box-o-bangs).
Here's the contribution Box-o-Bangs can make to the drudgery of unwrapping Easter eggs (from earlier this year -- incidentally prior to safety interlocks, a blast shield, and stuff that makes it less than deadly to operate).
We had kids as young as 4 or 5 learning to solder (with their parent's supervision), and plenty of kids maybe a hand-full of years older doing it solo. We also had our share of adults.
Here is one of my Wife's a friends who just happened to be passing. Along with her sister, they learned the dark art of soldering. (She is also demonstrating the use of safety equipment). They took their small boards with a couple of resistors soldered on them to make into pendants!
I was continually amazed at how well children under the age of 7 could pick up soldering -- and do repeatedly good solder joints. It was a little daunting giving them full control of a soldering iron, but nobody managed to burn themselves.
After learning to solder, several people bought a cheap kit and built either an electronic dice or a LED clock.
We were also visited by a pair of aliens looking for something pink to repair their space-ship. We offered to teach them to solder, but they declined after we indicated we did not have any pink solder.
Oh, I forgot to mention that we had a third group who were setting off liquid nitrogen explosions in buckets of ping pong balls (throwing them 10 to 15 metres into the air), crushing 44 Gal (200 litre) steel drums, and blowing things up with 4000A pulses of current from a 2.5 kV capacitor array (called "box-o-bangs).
Here's the contribution Box-o-Bangs can make to the drudgery of unwrapping Easter eggs (from earlier this year -- incidentally prior to safety interlocks, a blast shield, and stuff that makes it less than deadly to operate).
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no, we are not Americans 
