I work in Norwegian Maritime Search and Rescue, last year we had a 121.5MHz beacon go off, and it sounded like it was pretty close. We tried ground and ship based direction finders for about a day with no luck as all signs pointed to it being on-shore. So we dispatched a Sea King rescue helicopter with a direction finder and it tracked it to a local recycling plant. We sent an operator out with handheld direction finding equipment and he found an old beacon that had a change by date of mid 1993 on the battery. So yeah, those suckers can be a pain if they go off accidentally ;)

This kit is for impressing the people that pay for educational equipment, and materials. The administrators are the customer. Most teachers and schools teach to a set of learning objectives, these are set by national or state bodies. Kits like this are built to allow administrators, to buy a system that fills the lesson objectives, and then wash their hands of the process. Actual learning is left up to the teachers, if they have the skill work around the product, or if not simply follow the products proscribed plan. If you attend a teaching technology show or conference. The sales pitch is all about which governments objectives are being met, or how many schools are using the product. You can find products that are interested in student learning, but they are often at the back off the hall, and the teams are bright and energized people, who do not know know that the customers are not students.

About the accelerometer switch. It is build around a magnet. The tube is a magnet an the screw on one side and the contact bars on the other side are made from iron (plated with gold for good contact) The magnet will loosely stick to the screw but very firm to the big contacts. If a shock can loosen the magnet from the screw it will stick to the bigger contacts, and stay there until its pushed back to the screw with the reset button. The distance of the magnet to the contacts determines the force need to make it moved the closer they are the less force i needed. But such system is not very accurate, really exact measurements are not possible but it is good enough to detect a crash. :-)

The random nut and bolt came from the cutters/strippers. It's the gauge stop so you can actually strip wire and not just cut it. That'd be a frustrating lesson to each a kid if they all lost that stop.

I absolute agree, get lights flashing before you hit 5 minutes, literally. Battery, resistor and led. That is all you need for the first lesson. After they have lit that first LED, point out that the battery has two ends. You can switch the polarity of the LED to show also how semi-conductors work, make them reverse resistor too to point out the difference and... Practical examples, direct to results as fast as possible. Theory comes next, passion has to come first. My school had the same system, theory first and we went thru every single parameter in the equation before we get to solder anything. Of course i had experimented at home, dad has a shop. It was horrible way of teaching anything, things were complete haze and you started to avoid making any assumptions until you got to the lab... since that was the place we actually learned. I did have horrible teacher in theory though, he was actually mechanical engineer, read direct from the book, didn't answer a single question with: "look it up from the book". Lab teacher was absolute miracle, tough, hard and merciless, we did not get to make any mistakes before passing many subjects, safety was zero tolerance policy, absolutely not a single mistake. Kicked our asses but answered every question, knew how to make quick (and very dirty) analogies.

Since you asked for it: My opinion is, especially for kids, show them something cool, let them do it and THEN explain how. And don't go too much into the details. NEVER teach something wrong, but leaving out special cases and side effects and the pitfalls of real world components for now is fine. You can add those details later. The way they are doing it, you are lucky if your audience makes it halfway through without falling asleep or wandering off. Also, absorbing random facts thrown at you is not how learning works. You need an application for it, or even better, you see something which makes you curious and THEN you get the info you WANT right now.

Yeah the Mand kit, that's a no from me. So much focus on packaging and presentation (and still manage to get it cringeworthy wrong) and having maybe 20 dollars worth of parts and tools. A kid doesn't need to know quantum theory before connecting a led. I think Dave and many others here could put together a fun educational experimentation kit with twice as much components at half the price.

QR Code 51:39 says "I seriously hope you guys don't scan this." Too late! :)

It somewhat irks me about the statement at the end about "The curse of Linux". If you go back in time to when Unix and the C language was being developed at AT&T. AT&T was the only one who could call their OS UNIX. At the time being a Phone company monopoly they could not market and sell their new OS UNIX so one thing they did was give the tapes to Berkeley and so was born BSD. Between the two they made the OS what it is but since AT&T forbid anyone to call it UNIX everyone else who got a hold of the BSD tapes had to call their version something else like Sun-OS or IBM AiX, DEC OSF, HP-UX you get the picture. But still the OS was not in the hands of the hobbyist because the needed equipment was too expensive and out of reach of the average person. Along comes the revolution of the IBM PC, when 80286 and 80386 showed up it allowed end users to develop multi tasking OS's. But still the UNIX was not in reach of the average user and one big hiccup was a affordable C compiler, those suckers cost a lot. What Linus did was give us that UNIX like OS for basically no cost and Stallman of the GPL that you hate gave us GNU and this combination opened the door for everyone who wanted to develop applications in a UNIX like environment and a C compiler to do it that was basically at no cost to the user. Without Linux and without GNU you would not have today that Alexa, the Android phone, and millions of other devices that Linux and GNU made possible. You might hate Linux and you might hate GPL so be it but speaking you hate in letter does disrespect the thousands and thousands of developers that made all this possible and in a sense made Open/Free/NetBSD possible also. Ps: I think those older Electronics kits with the 101/200/500 experiments and the board with the springy terminals and you just connected wires were the best as a kid I had one that was 200 circuits and I made that book pretty dog eared and worn out.

I agree with Dave. I think teach the exciting stuff first, circuits, wires, motors, led's, then later fill in the theory. Teaching the theory off the bat can turn kids off.

That Mand Labs video looks like a cheesy Bollywood movie. I actually expected somebody to start a dance-off at some point.

I liked the old 300 in 1 kits but quickly grew frustrated that I wasn't learning enough to get much beyond their pre-cooked circuits without letting the smoke out. I think I would have liked seeing a circuit that does something, followed by a practical explanation of how it works with footnotes to a section with equations, history, and theory. Examples of how sub-circuits can be combined would have been nice too. So I guess I wanted fun with the option to learn enough to have more fun beyond what the author came up with.

I'm 12 minutes in and I can honestly say that I'm shocked at the amount of air time Dave is giving this kit (and even with the amount of praise that's being heaped on it, with no mention yet of price). Is this a sponsored review? Edit: Jesus christ. Covering the kit for 27 minutes?! The parts in this kit are essentially identical to the parts in 1,000 other "basic electronics kit" packages, all of which can be picked up for $30, and which come in a simple plastic compartmented container which is actually practical for reuse, unlike this thing. I don't get it.

Pro engineer with 25+ years experience here. Probably couldn't do the band gap / energy barrier / p-n junction talk if it saved my life. Enough already, the 3 nerds who want to know it can look it up on wikipedia.

Hi Dave, Looking forward to seeing you pout together that RC2014 Mini. I'm an avid Zilog fan and have engineered many systems based on the z-80. Also the z8001 and 8002 CPU's.

best of this electronics kit: the silica dry bags. :-)

I don't think this kit was built to target younger kids. It's more to the level of high school (13 years old) where they can comprend technical stuff and physics.

You see a well made and well organized kit - I see a lot of plastic, that will go to waste very soon in most cases. You see high quality paper - I see paper, that is so heavily inked, that it is almost impossible to recycle. I don't wanna ruin your enthusiasm and I know it's crucial, to get more ppl. to become engineers - but do we really need more and more of these kits? I got into EE without any of these kits and afaik so did all my EE friends.

Lol that “teaching” reminds me of how computer science is taught in school. They’ll start you with “while loops” and “for loops” instead of how to call some functions and get down to doing something actually cool.

My dad would buy me electronics kits when I was 4 and we built them together. I had to identify the parts from the manual and give them to him to solder. Seeing how I could make a radio or a music generator or even a led flasher seemed like magic back then! I am now designing and building my own kits and really like electronics.In primary school they tried teaching us all of these super technical details which honestly felt really boring at the time. I think high school would be the best time for that, especially considering that people learn chemistery and they'll know about electrons and protons and whatnot by then.

kit: these guys give the impression of not having the slightest idea of what they're talking about. ===>>> hit the *FAIL* button, after all!

Dave: will risk his life with iffy climbing gear, won't risk his network with iffy usb.

I would 100% fold that box back up and carry everything around in it if I were a kid looking to take the kit to a friend's place. Incredible packaging and presentation!

One thing I remember from when I was a kid was that if there was one thing that annoyed me it was "adults" treating me like an idiot that didn't deserve to know all the details. Sure, there were tons of stuff that didn't interest me at all, but when I got interested in something I wanted to know all about it - history, details - the lot - and if that was not available I would just lose interest right way. I think whoever produced this kit should get top marks for providing all those details - including the historic notes. Sure it might bore some readers but the ones who read it - they are the ones that become great engineers eventually.

'Propeller for the motor, fantastic.' Elite pun.

I don't want to be disrespectful to the person who designed that electronics kit, but at some point it's necessary to be honest. Most kids would prefer a fishing tackle box with the components in the various bins and a book of line drawings of how to make cool circuits. Dedicating a drawer to a minuature screwdriver and pair of strippers is just bizarre. I'd have to give it a D-

When I was a kid I bought Radio Shacks Basic Electronics book. It started out with basic physics that looks almost identical to what's in this book (right down to the tormented diode). That was my favorite part of the book. I didn't really care for the paint-by-numbers approach the most kits came with, I wanted to know why something worked the way it did. I think learning the fundamentals is necessary when starting out even for kids, just keep the underlying math to a minimum.

Mand Lab kit 1 manual was fantastic. The deeper theory material is exactly the stuff that makes me reread a manual especially at bedtime!

I'm for practical learning. My father started teaching me Phase and Hertz when I was little, I struggled to understand and got scared off for a long time. He was an elevator mechanic with a deep understanding of large scale multi phase electrical industrial plants. Problem was perspective, he forgot what it was like to be a blank slate, to not be able to picture electrons moving around a circuit and went into far to much detail to early. I ultimately had to unlearn allot of things the hard way, by electrocution aha. But in all seriousness, rewinding a three phase generator taught me more than any book.

Dave, I 100% agree with your critique. SKIP the theory, jump into the first breadboard circuit! The overall kit reminds me of my first chemistry set I got back in about 1969. As I recall the chemistry set skipped all the deep theory and was a series of "recipies" to show simple concepts like PH color change, evolving CO2, etc. How to make a better kit?? > have all the parts bins be general purpose storage NOT size fit for say the pliers or the cutters. Just have a drawer where the tools go. That way as the student gets better tools they can still fit in the tool tray. >have a tray for resistors with ranges markings to sort the resistors, a tray for leds, a tray for wires, a tray for switches, etc. >The video so so distracting that it washes out the actual knowledge that is being delivered. > the Indian accent? is one of the hardest to understand for me. Have a professional voice without the heavy accent. > Overall the IDEA is a good one but they missed the mark. > If the kit eventually became a portable lab that could grow it would have been a winner. >The book should have jumped right to breadboarding their first circuit. How about an EEVBLOG electronics lab for beginners??

it needs a non-threatening funny cooky english guy as a teacher. it just seems very Bollywood

Pet hate of mine when someone has music playing when they are talking. (Mand lab video)

Those electricity edutainment vids were truly horrible. I'm with you, Dave. Two minutes of that crap and most kids would be running for the door, any possible futures as electronics engineers or hobbyists in ruins

Dave - one of the few people on earth who knows how to properly show QR code in video

Oh hey, the DIN 1451 is the font used on German street signage and stuff. Put white text on a blue background for proper Autobahn resemblance

We called the accelerator switch in the ELT10 a G switch and it needed to be tested once a year or every annual inspection. The two screw terminals were for a remote switch in the cockpit for remote activation and testing. I am a A&P aircraft mechanic and worked on many aircraft with those exact locators installed in the aircraft.

merry christmas dave thanks for a year of learning the fun way!

"Don't eat the desiccant. Trap for young players" lol

Those acceleration switches often use magnets, one to hold it off, and one to hold it on.

ElectroBOOM should've made those videos!

That's how box cutters look in Australia... :D

About 50% of the video just on that electronic kit. I would have preferred more time devoted on the other stuff.

And Happy New Year! I forgot to mention that the supplied wire-stripper is missing its adjustment screw/nut combo that fix the closing limit for the wire gauge. Yes, there needs to be something to keep the handles from spreading so far (like another screw/nut combo to limit the spread!

Why did we spend 27 min on that kit?

Thanks Dave! Merry Christmas to you and yours. Joel

Couldn't wade through all the numerous commentsso this may be noted already, but: the 8748 in the aircraft xponder alt meter in a vintage processor of the MCU-48 series, not just an EEPROM. It has 1k of EEPROM program memory if i recall correctly.

I'd wager that kit is more for a trade school course.

Such a vast difference between the videos and the kit and textbooks themselves.

Great episode but wish you’d spent less time on the kit.

When i got into electronics as a kid all the theory would have turned me right off. I wanted to break, modify and fix things. I needed no maths when I built my first radio, astable multivibrator etc. Even when I was fixing and modifying CBs and AV kit I didn’t really need to know all that stuff, it all came later on. So for me, this kit seems to try and be all things but doesn’t quite get it right for any of them. Either make it lots of fun for kids, or go for a more advanced kit. Also not too keen on the amount of material used that will inevitably end up in land fill. Impressive in many ways, but just not quite there.

I think that the electronics kit should have a separate book with "in depth" explanations, and the main book just go straight to business.

You need to do some more vintage computer teardowns. I'd like to see an old music synthesizer teardown as well.

"I just found a nut here..." Nuts.

I loled when he said carry ur board around

My favorite Aussie of all time...Wishing you all a Very Happy & Most Excellent New Year!

12:04 The loose nut and screw that was found in the beginning is a part of wire stripper, used to adjust the cut depth.

That screw that you found rolling around with the strippers probably came out of them, causing them to open wider than normal.

Merry Christmas to you and yours from Kansas in the good ol USA. I hope you and your family are doing well. Thanks for all you do.

That's a real cheap crusty ELT. You absolutely figured out the on/off/arm switch and its purpose. You also figured out the g-switch and remote activation terminals. The remote activation terminals often just go to a switch in the cockpit for the pilot to activate during mayday, if they so choose. A secondary g-switch or water activated switch doesn't ring my bell. The underwater locator beacon is a separate device with its own activation circuitry. An ELT isn't designed to be used under water anyway. Modern ELTs are more complex than the one in this video. Same basic functionality, except that a modern ELT often also transmits a unique identifier code so that the receiver can -- cross-referencing a database -- identify the aircraft registration number, make, model, and owner. This comes in particularly handy when trying to identify which aircraft is transmitting a false warning. Accidental ELT transmissions are way more common than purposeful ELT transmissions. Without a unique identifier, its harder to pinpoint which aircraft, out of 30 parked in close proximity at an airport, is the offender. Of course the unique identifier and accompanying information is also very useful in the event of an actual emergency. Also, a modern ELT usually has a intermittent/automatically resetting g-switch. After g-switch activation, it keeps transmitting until the main switch is turned to off and back to arm. There is no reset plunger to push.

"Don't eat the dessicate pack; Trap for young players!". I LOST it, when he said that! 😆😆😆

Those older ELT's installed on most smaller aircraft were not exactly foolproof. As a mechanic I remember frequent false transmissions happening. The tower would announce on all frequencies that an ELT was going off and we would scramble to make sure it wasn't one of ours. You didn't want to have the FAA nocking on your door as you could be fined. In operation, though you didn't need to turn it on and off each flight, it stayed in the on position. For most small aircraft it was located in or near the baggage area.

I would not Buy The KIT for my kid :D

I would always contend that the practical usage should always be displayed first... As a (younger) person, I didn't care about how SPI worked on my Arduino, or how Java displayed an image on the display... I only cared that it did... I would say, even into college I would have liked to see this...

What that kit needs is no printed book, and instead a companion website that is the instructions. That way you can have a hands on practical introduction, and all the nerdy theory for those who are interested.

We used to call this device as blind altimeter. EPROM is for Gray Coding (In fact Gillham code)

The nut and screw go in the slot in the strippers. Where you tighten it in the slot changes the minimum closing point and keeps it from springing apart too far

Kids should not be taught too much theory until they first encounter the "magic smoke" being let out of their circuit.

Wow I got an ad for energizer batteries, pink bunny and all, as soon as you said battery and voltage.

The way the ELT works is that normally it's left in the armed position all the time. When it's not transmitting it really doesn't suck down any power, and if I remember right they're wired to the aircraft battery so the 9V battery is only a backup. The ON position is only used for testing the transmitter within the first 5 minutes of the hour (3 to 5 sweeps of the transmitted tone maximum). With a crash or a very hard landing, the force sensor does make contact to trigger the ELT and make it transmit, which it does continuously until the battery dies or it's reset. That's why it's standard practice to tune in 121.5 after a hard landing to see if you're needlessly transmitting the ELT beacon. Yes, it does have salt water (or water in general) detection in case of a water landing that isn't hard enough to set off the G-force sensor. I've never seen an ELT with an off position on the switch, only ON and ARM. There are different models of course.

The video felt really bad, way to many bad overlays and why the sound effects? The information was all over the place, if a child is supposed to learn something they have to be excited, to much technical information will make them leave and do something else! Teach the technical stuff while doing the exciting stuff, and over time! I would NOT but that kit! I'd rather teach the kids myself as I'm sure they'll be more excited and want to learn more

100% agreed, for beginners practice should come first, theory later. Anyone can understand that a LED will only light up in one direction but they don't really need to know why first.

This kit might be where Stewie learned electronics

When I was a youngster learning electronics, I somehow had the ability to dig into the theory only as far as I needed to understand the principles I needed to know at the time. I kind of started in the middle and moved forward and backward over time as my education an math / physics skills permitted. I agree that the physics behind electron movement and charge is beyond the younger experimenter, but at some point they need to learn it or they will be lost trying to understand more advanced concepts. Both methods of learning are valid: the theoretical and the practical. But neither suits every age or knowledge level. I think the best approach is to teach the theory to older students, and gloss over that with the younger ones. I remember many books I used back in the day would offer “sidebar” articles that explained the theory in detail, for those who wanted a more in depth discussion. As an engineer, I found it helpful to at least know what I don’t know, so I can get more information and drill farther into a specific subject when I need to.

"Don't eat the desiccant bags; trap for young players!"

4:01 All the electrons are going to fall out! That's what I was screaming in my head.

Well, I actually like the combination of theory and playing with real electronics this kit seems to offer. Too many fail to truly understand the physics involved because they never combine play and theory.

I made the regular Rc2014! Recomend it if you love old computers and the z80 cpu!

“This is the symbol of resistance “ no, omega is the symbol of resistance, that is the symbol of a resistor.. sigh..

I would have LOVED this kit when I was 6 years old. That kit is just outstanding!

The maximum retail price of the components is not more then $10 in this kit.

I am not a native speaker as well, but the Indian English in the Mand Labs video totally puts me off. Like bad sound quality, bad language proficiency is a real be downer.

The NVIDIA GTX 1070Ti was a graphics card released after its base model the GTX 1070. The 1070Ti slotted strangely in between the GTX 1070 and pre-existing GTX 1080, leading people to wonder why it existed. There was no need for the gap between the 1070 and 1080 to be filled, but NVIDIA saw it fit - probably as there was an excess of GP104 GPUs lying around... Hopefully that fills you in!

first mailbag video that got me bored - 25 min about this mand lab kit with lots of plastic and cardboard material with a few electronic parts is too much and from what i see, i would be more negative about it than you. as a child, i got the Kosmos electronics kits and loved it (the plastic box with the parts inside and the top is kind of an oldfashioned breadboard)

Speaking as a mechanical engineer, and sometime teacher I'm only interested in making circuits with LEDs, buzzers etc. It is really a boring waste off time going through all of that theory, when you're a youngster.

Wow! Would have loved to get such a kit for christmas (or Sinterklaas here in Netherlands) when I was young. Also would have loved the extra explaination to read just to sit in my little corner with the electronic stuff and read a little, or in the back of the car or on holiday somewhere ... Simple and not toooooo long explainations and you can find the extra's later (and of course don't read the stuff that's too complicated when you are 10 years old). Nice!

Copy pasta of my reply to another comment, but I agree wholeheartedly about the technical versus practical / fun aspect of learning. And not only for kids - I think it applies to people of all ages. What matters is their experience level with the topic - not their age. I spend some time teaching programming locally and to a few friends. And my mindset has been to get them doing cool shit as fast as humanly possible! Even if that means having to skim over some genuinely important aspects at first. Once they're interested and enthused, they will automatically care about the details, because now they understand why the details matter. Thus you can start to merge the technical difficult stuff with the fun / easy stuff, because they have a reason to care, it's not just being forced down their throat. Going with the technical details right out of the gate will put off people who may very well be EXCELLENT engineering minds, that just happen to have a different learning preference, before they get a chance to discover it. Shame, since so much education is done this backwards way. I've had so many positive responses to my way of teaching, I really feel that it's not a fluke. I've had people who have previously taken serious programming classes come back to me and tell me wow, I understood more in 1 hour with you, than I did after a whole year of programming in school or whatever. Which I find shocking because I am not a teacher nor an amazing programmer. But from what they tell me, in school they were just instantly overwhelmed by technobabble and genuinely hard concepts, and so they never made it past that initial brick wall. I have spent years struggling to learn and comprehend this stuff myself (as a slow learner), and as a result of having suffered through the difficult bits, I think I have a good understanding of what parts actually matter to a beginner, and how to stay motivated. I think geniuses probably shouldn't teach the introductory stuff in any topic - I think it should be taught by people who struggled but eventually understood the subject matter, because they understand where the difficult parts are. Someone who just breezes through it will only get angry that their dumb students don't breeze through it also. That's my experience anyway... I'm sure someone is about to tell me I'm wrong and that learning the hard way is the only way and if you can't make it you are dumb, but, hey that's how the Internet goes!

As a child, Christmas was a great time. Because I got new things to take apart.... To be honest I am over 40 and still not grown up. After over 20 years in the industry, I know that it is the curiosity that drives the knowledge. Not the other way around.

I think I speak PC nerd well enough to decode "The 1070ti should not exist". It's probably referring to Nvidia's ridiculous market segmentation across the Pascal series of GPUs. They release a series of cards, then either slightly buff or neuter each version of the card to create cards in between that really aren't necessary. This produces a lot of confusion for consumers. Though what I would say is that the DDR4 version of the GT1030 REALLY should not exist, because DDR4 is terribly slow for a GPU compared to GDDR5 and the consumer likely won't know what they're getting unless they know the difference.

theres a choice to read or skip the complex explanation. Ive been playing with wires since i was 5 thats 50 years - and I'd still love a go with this kit.

I agree with you on what sort material would be better to start off with for introducing beginners to electronics. I know you can't compare apples and oranges, but as a musician it makes sense to me to draw some paralells to when I was a beginner gaining interest in playing music... I can imagine how much importance I would have vested in things like how sound waves work, frequency, music theory, and the history of classical music, etc. back when all I wanted to do after I finished my homework was crank up my little entry-level amp and try to sound like Jimi Hendrix

Propellor for the motor; ROTFL! 🤣

The nut and the screw belong to the wire strippers ,they are used to limit the min cutting size

Polly put the kettle on. I love it.

The best out I ever had as a kid, started each project with a schematic and build instructions. Then followed with some troubleshooting and ended with a few insightful paragraphs on the theory. In my opinion that is the most effective way to implement the theory at an entry level.

I was the kid who read all those old books and learned by myself. I remember LOVING the history facts and technicalitets of what I implemented. If you are 7 yo. kid reading an electronics book, you are more than capable of skipping around in the book and jumping over the boring parts if you just want something to work. But in this way, I might as well have read those interesting facts about silicone and boron atoms, because the information was kept localized and not as an appendix. I would never buy an electronics history book, but I would definitely buy an electronics book. These things help it "click" for me. I need the full picture of what I'm doing, I feel like I'm working blindly like an idiot if I don't know the reasons WHY we are doing stuff, who invented it, for what purpose and what THEIR struggles were to create the tools I'm using. I'm a software developer by day and mechanic (with electronics focus) by night these days. I apply the above liberally to all learning to this day.

I remember my electronic kits as a kid .. the part "after one evening it would be all over the bench" is so painfully correct. Well, not totally .. I was working/"playing" mostly on the floor back then and well .. the vacuum got somewhat noisier and I was missing a few more resistors.

I would start the kit with Breadboard layout and how to glow a LED. And then after a fiew lessons I would revisit previous experiences/lessons with more details.

Hi Dave , ELTs are typically mounted in the tail of an aircraft. The terminals go to a switch on the panel (dashboard) so they it could triggered by the pilot pre crash or in the case of an emergency landing in say a remote area. The batteries are part of the maintenance schedule and are replaced by date.

I started my 8 year old daughter out on soldering together a SparkFun Simon Says game together. And after we got done putting it together, explained to her the basics while playing with the kit.

Looks really well done, obviously a huge amount of thought went into it. But I completely agree with the theory being just way too much. If I had to learn music theory before ever picking up a guitar I would have never played a single chord, learned a single song, or even strummed a string. I learned to play by ear and THEN once I was somewhat decent at playing the general thirst for understanding more about how music works and how to write my own songs kicked in and I then willingly had the urge to understand the more advanced building blocks of music. I think if someone younger was to start with this it would be helpful to have some guidance. Being an engineer I always go straight to showing my kids how to build circuits. The immediate demonstration of using electricity to create practical parable results creates an immediate interest. Theory bores them to death and they can build a basic electronic circuit knowing the most basic principles. As they've gained experience they've never needed to know about atoms. I mean who does? It's only theory anyway. I love the science but it's even more remote to electronics than music theory is to music. You can be brilliant at building electronic devices without ever knowing a lick about negative ions or potential. I will say that once you get to a point that math is extremely useful...actually absolutely necessary as anyone who had done anything with electronics well quickly realize. Far more than any theory about things we can't actually see.