After School club projects

I second coder27's concerns about a meaningful experience in 45 minutes.  So let me look back over 50 years to see what might be useful...

With electronics, probably the best example is a crystal radio.  Just five components: L, C, D, antenna, and earphone.  The lesson is tremendous: all the energy for driving that earphone comes from the radio waves, all you're doing is filtering out the noise.  Magic!

With computing, I remember my daughters getting a lot of pleasure out of playing with Logo and its screen turtle.  With a few SLOC you can draw amazingly pretty pictures, and then make little changes and make other pretty pictures.  If you have a physical turtle, you get to draw them which is even better and you have something to take home for Mom and/or Dad to put on the 'fridge.

I had a lot of fun in high school with relay kits.  You got to make fun logic circuits the Shannon way with lots of clacking noise and light bulbs switching on and off.  Start with something simple like AND and OR gates, and then expand to full adders and then tally circuits.  Clickity clickity clack clack.  You get to see and hear something really happening.

I bet I would have had a lot of fun with Lego Mindstorm back when I was 11.  Lego was pretty much for art back then -- if you wanted to engineer something, you used your Erector set (Meccano for mes amis across the Pond).  In the USA, there was a time when 99% of engineers had Erector sets when they were kids -- I'm from the last generation of those.

These are all examples of things that take the spark and let it grow.  Be careful of projects that smother the spark with arbitrary complexity.

John Beetem wrote:

 

With electronics, probably the best example is a crystal radio.  Just five components: L, C, D, antenna, and earphone.  The lesson is tremendous: all the energy for driving that earphone comes from the radio waves, all you're doing is filtering out the noise.  Magic!

 

I remember building a crystal set as a kid, nothing much can beat it for simplicity and instant gratification (should help for the kids of today who are more used to that than me), something you can literally build in a couple of minutes...  Sadly these days with the rise of digital radio it seems that it's soon to become impossible for a lot of us.  Here in the UK it seems that analogue radio could be turned off as soon as a couple of years from now.

John Beetem wrote:

 

With electronics, probably the best example is a crystal radio.  Just five components: L, C, D, antenna, and earphone.  The lesson is tremendous: all the energy for driving that earphone comes from the radio waves, all you're doing is filtering out the noise.  Magic!

 

I remember building a crystal set as a kid, nothing much can beat it for simplicity and instant gratification (should help for the kids of today who are more used to that than me), something you can literally build in a couple of minutes...  Sadly these days with the rise of digital radio it seems that it's soon to become impossible for a lot of us.  Here in the UK it seems that analogue radio could be turned off as soon as a couple of years from now.

I remember having the same experience and what motivated me to become a ham radio operator, but nowadays in the age of the iPod, Xbox and SDR, the crystal radio is not very exciting for the new generation of "digital natives."

-J