I volunteer on Sundays at the Boston Museum of Science, and lead an activity showing kids how to make circuits out of Play-Doh (yup, regular Play-Doh -- it cond

I volunteer on Sundays at the Boston Museum of Science, and lead an activity showing kids how to make circuits out of Play-Doh (yup, regular Play-Doh -- it conducts electricity!), 9 volt batteries, LEDs, motors, and a few other odds and ends. You'd be shocked at how many kids -- mostly boys in the 8-13 range -- show up at the activity, full of confidence, the parents are telling me how their genius child is constantly doing Arduinos/Rasberry pis/Little Bits/electrical engineering flavor-of-the-month toy at home, the kids are like "Oh, I already know how to do this!" I hand them they equipment, and they promptly take all the leads for the LED and the battery and jam them into the single ball of Play-Doh expecting it to do something. Well, it does do something -- it short-circuits my battery is what it does! Microcontrollers and simple circuits are just so different, the skills are different, the mindset is different, and people tend to react to them differently. Once the kids, or adults, do finally get the LED to light up, they're often just completely blown away, in a way that you or I might find a little silly. Parents are constantly taking pictures, filming their kids doing this for, like, 10 minutes, just shocked (not literally!) and amazed that they're actually controlling electricity. It feels a little primal/fundamental and magical. Like you're interacting directly with some previously-mysterious force of nature, whereas some of the other electrical engineering tools feel more like "appliances," which people use every day. I've seen thousands of reactions to people playing with the programmable robots, and Little Bits, Makey Makey (which also teaches circuits, but there's a lot of other "stuff" going on), Lego Mindstorms, but I have to say that those things never get quite the immediate and primal reaction that Play-Doh, LEDs, and 9 volt batteries get. They're just such different things.