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What Arduino-like kit do you recommend to get started with children?
Hi Tildes,
I'm looking to introduce my children (aged 10 or so) to simple electronics (blinking lights, simple sensors, ...). I've played with Arduino in the past, but I see that there are now many competing options: Arduino, cheap rip-offs, RPi zero, adafruit, ESP32, ... It's easy to get lost!
Which do you recommend? Ideally, I'd like something cross-platform and open-source, easy to set up (ideally a kit with everything included), and of course not insanely expensive.
Edit: thanks everyone for the good advice! There are so many good options...
I highly recommend the Micro:bit. It's one of the cheapest micro controllers and definitely the easiest to use and get started.
Their code editor is just a free web app with no account required. Lots of interactive tutorials, good documentation and community. One of the coolest features of the editor is that you can switch between block based coding to python or javascript.
I've been teaching kids coding for a while now and this is by far my favourite platform. I'm a huge fan of the raspberry pi but I found it's a little more work upfront to get started and some kids just lose interest.
I think the microbit does a better job of allowing kids to just jump into coding/electronics and have fun. My recommendation would be to first get a microbit, and then if they start to outgrow it upgrade them to a Raspberry Pi down the road.
If you do decide to get a microbit I suggest buying the new Version 2 board. They added a microphone, speaker and touch sensor.
Depending on where you are, Micro:bit kits may be available for loan from your local library. They are from mine. I think the BBC wanted to get them into all UK libraries but I also think that was around the time covid was kicking off and so things might have stalled in some places. I may be misremembering that though.
I had a play with a couple, they are fun and very easy to use.
I would go with RPi (the zeros are nice and cheap) if only because there's a shedload of kid-friendly tutorials and howtos out there for the platform, as well as groovy hardware for when they get past controlling leds/motors/etc. You also get faster responses because you can do it all "live" on the system rather than with an Arduino/etc which require sketches to be made on a separate machine and then loaded onto the device. The Pi is pretty open iirc. Not to the point of being open-source hardware but it runs linux and that's enough for me at least. Most Pi tutorials seem to be in python which is useful for all sorts down the line, but obviously you can do things in other languages if you want.
Would you recommend a breakout board with the pi? I imagine that would be required to play with some basic wires, resistors, LEDs, etc. But it could be fun to program an LED with python.
I tend to buy the ones with the pre-soldered headers, then use some jumpers and a breadboard for hooking up basic components like LEDs and so on. Pretty sure you can get some kind of kit with all the goodies in (sorry, don't have time to find the right kit, but there's plenty there)
Actual breakout boards for dedicated things I might wait a bit to pick up. Get the basics down first! There are some really cool things out there though.
How old are they?
When I was a kid I got a Radio Shack electronics kit sort of like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Elenco-EP-50-Electronic-Playground-50-in-One/dp/B00000IUD2/
You connect up the electronics components by putting jumper wires into springs, so no soldering is needed.
My brother and I made a bunch of circuits, although some of them were blindly following directions; I didn't really get how capacitors or radio coils worked.
They're 8 and 10, but my idea is more to create simple things with them, and then let them play with the circuits. I was thinking of getting a kit like this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001653349193.html. The downside of these cheap Chinese kits is that you don't really know what you get, and their microcontrollers require messing up with proprietary firmware blobs, which is not fun. So I was wondering if there were any higher quality kits. I don't mind spending a little more.
At the risk of suggesting something you've already thought of, why not the official Arduino sensor kit bundle? Especially for 8 and 10 year olds, it takes a lot of the fiddly bits out of getting started while still teaching electronics concepts, and while the Raspberry Pi family is great, an Arduino Uno will always be simpler and harder to muck up.
This isn't really what you're asking for, but what came to mind for me when you mentioned getting kids into simple electronics was Lego Mindstorms and this Klutz Circuit Clay kit that I've been patiently waiting to buy for my niece once she's old enough.
Seeedstudio sells an educational arduino starter kit that is a pretty good way to get into electronics with zero knowledge to start with. It’s a single board unit that includes an arduino comparable board alongside several individual modules dedicated to sensors, switches, and the like. What’s nice about it is that everything is internally connected, so if you don’t break apart the individual pieces you don’t need to do any wiring. And once you take them apart, they have a pseudo standardized wiring harness that will make adding them back to the arduino very easy. It even comes preloaded with a sample sketch to prove that everything is working.
Just keep In mind that the kit is going to basically keep your kids entirely within the digital domain. There is no resistors, capacitors, or diodes to deal with.
Thumb through this list, it's the official Arduino product offerings. More focused, maybe the Arduino workshop kit, Student Kit or Starter Kit
For what would amount to guided self-discovery (you and your kids) the second two would probably be the better options. Maybe even scrounge up some parts for something like an Atari Punk Console if you want to build something that'll give your kids something they can interact with in a fun way (It's a 555 chip with some diodes, and a speaker, easily breadboarded).