Electronics for Kids, 2nd Edition
nostarch.comIn the 1960s, Kosmos made the best electronics sets available. If you went through the kits, you received a complete undergraduate course in electronics (less the calculus).
Oh I absolutely loved those. In the early 90, when I was maybe 6 years old, I had this one, the left half at least:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kosmos-electronic-sy...
It came with over 20 electronic schematics, pictograms how they were set up in the box, an explanation how they worked and a kid compatible story about a professor, a robot and I think some kids. I absolutely loved it. And I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldnt have chosen my current career and hobby trajectory had it not been for this electronics set.
I've moved cities multiple times now and the kit has disappeared over the years. You can still get them on ebay some times, but I was too cheap to buy one.
Through an incomprehensibly unlikely coincidence, someone put this exact kit on the sidewalk for grabs a fee houses and away, maybe a year ago or two. Naturally I took it, and it's complete and seems even unused.
I am now a father and I hope my daughter will find this kit just as interesting as I did 30 years ago.
There ought to be something similar for calculus too. While a detailed and formal treatment of the subject can be delayed till the age at which it's introduced now, I feel that the intuition and feel for calculus can be formed more efficiently at an earlier age.
If nothing else, it may help them understand where to seek solutions for the common problems they encounter. I started learning Electronics at a fairly young age using undergraduate level textbooks that I found lying around. The need for and relationships between concepts in calculus, logarithms and trigonometry were a recurrent problem for me.
PS: If anybody is wondering, those books were from an earlier generation engineer. They were very interesting, to say the least. All the circuits (amplifiers, rectifiers, oscillators, multivibrators, mixers, various RF Txr and Rxr designs, etc) were using vacuum tubes! Diodes, triodes, pentodes, thyratrons, magnetrons, TWTs, etc were used liberally in them. It had a description of an early form of the Instrumental Landing System (ILS). There were also descriptions of some early generation semiconductor devices and their similarity to vacuum tubes. I don't think ICs were in much use back then, because the book had no mentions about them.
I used to spend hours at a time with those books when I was a child. Later I graduated in Electronics engineering and went on to work on the avionics for a satellite launcher. Vacuum tubes were museum pieces by the time I was born. But I was the only one in my undergraduate class who had seen or knew anything about vacuum tubes, when we had lessons on CRTs, magnetrons, etc. I can't stress how deeply those books influenced my education and career. Sweet memories!
> The need for and relationships between concepts in calculus, logarithms and trigonometry were a recurrent problem for me.
Oh my gosh, this was me growing up! I loved tinkering with electronics and programming, but I kept bumping against my lack of knowledge wrt more advanced math topics. I usually hacked around it, or more often just switched to a different project.
Now that I'm taking calculus, I feel like I always have a corresponding application for each topic we cover. It's very exciting!
My father introduced this book to me when I was around 10. I will forever be grateful.
https://www.worldofbooks.com/products/calculus-the-easy-way-...
> There ought to be something similar for calculus too.
mathacademy.com very thourough and highly effective.
Basic integration and differentiation would fit right in with algebra class. You can teach it in about half an hour.
They shouldn't teach calculus like they taught it to me and my peers. Basically we just one day started "differentiating" equations. We learnt a completely mechanical process. Like how to chop an onion, except it doesn't actually feed you or taste delicious.
It took me a while to realise the point. It's all about rates of change. They should start with that. No need to bother with the maths, just look at graphs and be like "that's a steeper slope than that", and, ooh, that one's sloping in the opposite direction. This is a fundamental intuition that's so useful to have. Most people don't understand that braking is acceleration. They just don't have the mental model that lets them see fuel burn and braking as opposite things. The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.
The tube circuits I studied were marvels of clever engineering.
I loved my Kosmos electronics kits. My mom threw out the kits eventually but I still have the manuals.
https://patric-sokoll.de/SonstigeSammlungen/Kosmos%20E200/Ha...
My first computer was their CP1. It was aimed at older children and teens. You programmed it in a custom assembly language. The manual included lots of projects and instructions on how to hook it up to their electronics kits.
http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/kosmos_comput...
http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/pictures/kosm...
In the 80s and 90s, RadioShack also had an impressive kit collection. Just realizing it was to get kids “hooked”.
Elenco continues to sell one of the kits that I used to have, less RadioShack branding.
Not a kid but what are the next steps after this book? I've been trying to find the steps of the ladder between "playing with muxes and clocks" and "designing a USB3 peripheral", but that has been a challenge in itself.
Don't wish to write my usual rant on this here but that's the curse of electronics books. You get taught by a recipe book but you don't leave with enough skills to design your own one. Nor do you know which recipes should be served together. It requires a much lower level of understanding and that is hard.
I got taught via recipe books then studied EE at university and had to throw everything away. Then I started in industry and had to throw that away again. There's a huge moat between the two ends.
Make 5-10 of multivibrators each on different schemeatics. Bonus point - make them as fast as you can - starting from the prototyping stage and finishing with the device ready to be either gifted or used as a lab generator.
But playing with clocks and multiplexer is definitely not a beginning of the ladder.
Yeah, it seems clocks and muxes is what comes after this book? A possibly not so great suggestion is building a radio(receiver)? It is pretty challenging with oscillators, tuned circuits, mixers, amplifiers (basically a mix of RF, AC and DC).
I figure it's fair enough, since this is a great but not free book, to drop https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ - a truly amazing, and in my opinion extraordinarily well written and organized free learning resource.
Specifically https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/
It's a labor of love and a great reference to go back to, but I wouldn't recommend it for newcomers.
Traditional books benefit from having an editor who (ideally) asks questions like "who are you writing for", "what's the best order to introduce ideas", and "how much detail is enough". If you don't ask these questions, you often end up getting too deep into the weeds or jumping back and forth between ideas in ways that can be difficult to follow. To give you a specific example, the guide spends a lot of time on some of the more obscure theories in DC network analysis before even defining what a battery is, capacitors and inductors are explained in the DC section by focusing on their AC characteristics, there is a ton of unnecessary quantum physics trivia ahead of explaining what a diode is, discussion of op-amps kicks off with an odd reference to calculus, etc.
Again, I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just that (properly edited) books have their merits.
I think you make excellent points and can't see anything I don't agree with. For me, there's no substitute for a proper book, especially being a bit of an eccentric learner.
But certainly AAC could be a brilliant supplementary resource.
The Art of Electronics, by Horowitz and Hill, is aimed at a university or professional audience, but could also be an incredible learning resource for a younger student (or older hobbyist!) interested in learning more about the field.
Speaking for myself, I would have loved to read something like this when I was first experimenting with electronics as a child. A lot of the details would have gone over my head, but even just knowing the general outlines of the topics it covered would have been a huge step up.
I love no starch press books. Nothing else to add.
Is there a parts kit sold for this book? I couldn't find one online.
Jameco sells one [1]
[1] https://www.jameco.com/z/KIT-EFK-BUNDLE-Jameco-Kitpro-Compon...
Im reminded of a book from Dick Smith in the 90s called “Funway into electronics”.
It had a wonderful kit where you would use screws in a board so you could see every wire path. Much easier to explain than modern breadboards
Discontinued until they can add age verification to wires.
does anybody know if it will be available for shipping outside US? Seems a cool book, from the chapter preview
Amazon.de for example already has it(for preorder). Oreilly books online has the first edition available right now. I reckon they might add the second revision when it comes out.
Yes, I've bought book several books from No Starch Press and delivered to APAC.
As a parent I would appreciate if it came with an age recommendation.
It's right there on the page. Age 10 and above
I had a hard time finding it as well. I think maybe because the text is underlined and the font is small? It is harder to read "into" that text. Maybe it should be on its own line? Or it should be up next to "Full Color" / the cover? Maybe some "copy" pro would know the reason right away but it seems rather hard to find to me.
While I agree that it could be more prominent, the old man in me wants to scream "Don't be so lazy in reading!"
If you ignore the reviews near the end, the page doesn't have a lot of text. And not everything needs to be accessible by quickly scanning.
I found the age guidance with cmd+F, "age", enter. Probably would have tried "year" next if that hadn't found it.
As a parent, I find the age recommendations insulting.
It's only a recommendation, not a strict instruction. It's the age group that the author is targeting and is assumed to have the requisite background knowledge and reasoning skills required to follow the material. It's understood to vary between individuals.
This is similar to 'intended audience' section of technical books for adults. Do you find those insulting?
He requested that age requirement, it makes him looking like an etatist. His family will never raise Terence Tao even if their boy will be exactly same qualities.
Some kids use to solder earlier than at 10y.o. so the intended audience is wrong. If the kid has not learned what is a transistor by the age of 5 yet, they are not an intended audience.