When I was I kid I used to chew through the Radio Shack "50 in 1," "100 in 1," etc. electronics kits. The kits were essentially cardboard boxes with lots of simple electronic parts spread out on them. I followed the instructions that had me connect dozens of wires from one springy terminal to another. In the end, with a little luck and patience I had a working buzzer or flasher or AM radio or FM transmitter or whatever. I have fond memories of working through these kits, and though I'm sure I learned from them, in retrospect I mostly was just blindly following directions and enjoying the beeps and buzzes that resulted.
Fast forward a lot of years, and my kids get a Snap Circuits kit from Elenco. These kits are the real deal -- fun, educational, easy to use, grow in difficulty, and apparently selling well. My kids are burning through this first kit -- asking questions like "what happens if I replace the speaker with a lightbulb?" In a, well, snap, the speaker module comes out, the lightbulb module goes in and it flashes to the tune. I didn't have to help at all.
To make a happy ending even happier, when I looked up the company on the web, I discovered that they're a small independent business, with an online community and many kid-created and uploaded extra circuit designs. My only complaint is that their website seems to have been designed and implemented in 1996 and updated only by random astigmatic squirrels in a hurry (i.e. it sucks and was done in MS Word). But don't let that get you down -- these are great toys.
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