This is my principal objection to some of the Make and Mimms stuff. It's recipes and instructions not building understanding. You aren't asked to discover stuff or build a mental model, merely replicate and copy.
After University classes, I realize now they didn’t even hint at biasing or use feedback.
All the resistors in the transistor circuits seemed overly “ornamental” and I could t see their function from the descriptions.
If nothing else, it may help them understand where to seek solutions for the common problems they encounter. I started learning Electronics at a fairly young age using undergraduate level textbooks that I found lying around. The need for and relationships between concepts in calculus, logarithms and trigonometry were a recurrent problem for me.
PS: If anybody is wondering, those books were from an earlier generation engineer. They were very interesting, to say the least. All the circuits (amplifiers, rectifiers, oscillators, multivibrators, mixers, various RF Txr and Rxr designs, etc) were using vacuum tubes! Diodes, triodes, pentodes, thyratrons, magnetrons, TWTs, etc were used liberally in them. It had a description of an early form of the Instrumental Landing System (ILS). There were also descriptions of some early generation semiconductor devices and their similarity to vacuum tubes. I don't think ICs were in much use back then, because the book had no mentions about them.
I used to spend hours at a time with those books when I was a child. Later I graduated in Electronics engineering and went on to work on the avionics for a satellite launcher. Vacuum tubes were museum pieces by the time I was born. But I was the only one in my undergraduate class who had seen or knew anything about vacuum tubes, when we had lessons on CRTs, magnetrons, etc. I can't stress how deeply those books influenced my education and career. Sweet memories!
Oh my gosh, this was me growing up! I loved tinkering with electronics and programming, but I kept bumping against my lack of knowledge wrt more advanced math topics. I usually hacked around it, or more often just switched to a different project.
Now that I'm taking calculus, I feel like I always have a corresponding application for each topic we cover. It's very exciting!
It took me a while to realise the point. It's all about rates of change. They should start with that. No need to bother with the maths, just look at graphs and be like "that's a steeper slope than that", and, ooh, that one's sloping in the opposite direction. This is a fundamental intuition that's so useful to have. Most people don't understand that braking is acceleration. They just don't have the mental model that lets them see fuel burn and braking as opposite things. The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.
https://www.worldofbooks.com/products/calculus-the-easy-way-...
mathacademy.com very thourough and highly effective.
Modern chemistry sets are extremely lightweight and boring in comparison.
Current ones are little more than what you can find in the kitchen.
It came with over 20 electronic schematics, pictograms how they were set up in the box, an explanation how they worked and a kid compatible story about a professor, a robot and I think some kids. I absolutely loved it. And I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldnt have chosen my current career and hobby trajectory had it not been for this electronics set.
I've moved cities multiple times now and the kit has disappeared over the years. You can still get them on ebay some times, but I was too cheap to buy one.
Through an incomprehensibly unlikely coincidence, someone put this exact kit on the sidewalk for grabs a fee houses and away, maybe a year ago or two. Naturally I took it, and it's complete and seems even unused.
I am now a father and I hope my daughter will find this kit just as interesting as I did 30 years ago.
https://patric-sokoll.de/SonstigeSammlungen/Kosmos%20E200/Ha...
My first computer was their CP1. It was aimed at older children and teens. You programmed it in a custom assembly language. The manual included lots of projects and instructions on how to hook it up to their electronics kits.
http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/kosmos_comput...
http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/pictures/kosm...
That feeling when you hit the right spot on the crystal after stringing up a long antenna in your room…
Some years ago I was in Stuttgart and looked at the Kosmos offerings, and they were pretty sad.
Elenco continues to sell one of the kits that I used to have, less RadioShack branding.
Specifically https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/
Traditional books benefit from having an editor who (ideally) asks questions like "who are you writing for", "what's the best order to introduce ideas", and "how much detail is enough". If you don't ask these questions, you often end up getting too deep into the weeds or jumping back and forth between ideas in ways that can be difficult to follow. To give you a specific example, the guide spends a lot of time on some of the more obscure theories in DC network analysis before even defining what a battery is, capacitors and inductors are explained in the DC section by focusing on their AC characteristics, there is a ton of unnecessary quantum physics trivia ahead of explaining what a diode is, discussion of op-amps kicks off with an odd reference to calculus, etc.
Again, I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just that (properly edited) books have their merits.
But certainly AAC could be a brilliant supplementary resource.
I got taught via recipe books then studied EE at university and had to throw everything away. Then I started in industry and had to throw that away again. There's a huge moat between the two ends.
But playing with clocks and multiplexer is definitely not a beginning of the ladder.
[1] https://www.jameco.com/z/KIT-EFK-BUNDLE-Jameco-Kitpro-Compon...
It had a wonderful kit where you would use screws in a board so you could see every wire path. Much easier to explain than modern breadboards
This is similar to 'intended audience' section of technical books for adults. Do you find those insulting?
