← Back to context

Comment by rsync

2 days ago

We just aged out of this as our youngest child is now 11, but I can affirm that magnatiles are fantastic and fun - and that is coming from someone who lionizes legos and considers them the ne plus ultra of toys for children.

That being said ...

We got a lot of mileage - many good years of use from male and female children - out of "Snap Circuits":

https://elenco.com/

A very, very cool building ecosystem with easy to build and understand recipes - we built a working FM radio, for instance. Not at all fussy or fragile.

My children are not particularly "STEMy" but they all enjoyed breaking out the "circuit kit".

6 comments

rsync

Reply
Macha  2 days ago

I can confirm as someone that had these or a very similar kit as a kid that they were enjoyable and the knowledge proved useful when I started working with real circuits in high school and college.

rendaw  1 day ago

They blocked Japan IPs on product pages...

  • mkesper  3 hours ago

    Even Germany. Simply stupid.

    • stockresearcher  3 hours ago

      Snap Circuits are just standard electronic components that combine with each other using standard snap buttons [1] from the textile industry. The real “genius” of them is that the grid spacing and the width/thickness of each component is well-balanced such that they are held together securely while being easy to separate using the lever action that a child naturally produces when grabbing something (ie don’t pull straight up). It should be easily replicable and I’d be surprised that there aren’t knockoffs in all the countries that they block from their website.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_fastener