Glenn, My two grandsons had a soldering iron in their hands at about the same age as your son. With a little instruction about the proper technique (heat both the lead and the solder pad, along with instruction about not using a big blob of solder), they both were successful at it. One showed no further interest in building anything electronic, but the other is going at it with a passion - he is into not only building kits but creating his own circuit boards and his own trials at "how things work" - he is now 15 and has accompanied me to Dayton for the last 2 years. His call is KJ4NYI, and has made a lot of ham radio friends in the process. He is also taking some of my old junk off my hands to experiment with. He still has not figured out how to make his radio controlled submarine re-surface, but he knows how to sink it :-)
So let your son have a try at soldering, then introduce him to some relatively easy kits. My grandson has had a lot of fun building some of the QRPme kits - they are easy (but he may need some help with the instructions - sometimes sparse). At that age, they can get excited about most anything that appeals to them, let him experiment a bit to see where he will eventually fit in the world. 73, Don W3FPR On 11/21/2011 3:40 PM, ON4WIX wrote: > Hi group, > > My oldest son, nearing his seventh birthday, has for the past few years > been interested in those radio things sitting on my desk, bleeping away. > > From time to time he seems to enjoy tuning around the bands in search of > all those strange noises from far away and mysterious places. > Today he asked me if I could teach him to build some stuff like he had > me seen build (or rather - put together) so many times before. > Of course, considering his age soldering is still out of the question. > I've googled around a bit and apparently there are quite a few kids' > electronic assembly kits around, but almost all of them require > soldering skills. As an example, here's a kit offered by Einstein's > Toolbox: http://www.einsteinstoolbox.com/learn-to-solder-kit.html > So, my question to this knowledgeable group is this: are any of you > aware of electronics teaching kits aimed at the 7-10 yo age group? I'd > think these would be some sort of breadboard assembly kind of kits, > using spring-tension terminals to build some nifty projects like sirens, > chaser lights, maybe an Xtal receiver (although medium wave has become > rather quiet over here in EU)... > ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
