Anna picked out an old electronic circuit cookbook off of my bookshelf this afternoon and said "I want to do this!". With no comprehension at all of what the drawings were about, I think she just wanted to draw in the book since it was an ancient (I bought it when I was 12) amateur hobbyist electronic book that was actually hand-drawn. Always keen to seize those teachable moments, I offered to show her what it was all about. Since I haven't touched any of this stuff for something like a couple of decades, my brain was scrambling to retrieve enough information from archival storage to have her do something interesting enough to generate some interest. The first thing that came to mind was to let her light something up, and these displays happened to be nearby.
Yes, Victor is in this picture in body but he knows he is a single homework problem away from his quota of screen time (something that motivates Victor a lot but Anna not at all), so he wasn't interested in joining in the fun at this time.
Victor was keen to join in after his allotted screen time, and by that time my brain had engaged enough for me to assemble the components for a simple counter circuit (an simpler version than the circuit you can see in the book in the corner). Unfortunately I gave him the nicest-looking breadboard, without remembering why it looked nice and didn't have any melted or burned spots: I never used it because it was awful, in particular inserting anything into the bus strips was nigh impossible. So Victor got quickly frustrated and decided Lego would be more fun.
Anna lasted much longer than Victor (perhaps just because she had a much better breadboard), but eventually decided she just wanted to do art. When she asked about plugging this masterpiece of random wires and resistors in my quick “NO” response was met with “I mean pretend plug”, and she “plugged it” into the cable holder on the monitor that's beside her. I suspect she really wanted to plug it into the wall.
I finished one digit of Victor's circuit myself just to show them that they hadn't been that far away from a circuit that actually did something (wasn't enough time before supper to do the other digit). Not sure what they've taken away from the experiment.
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