It's not clear to me what advantage this board has over a couple breadboards, jumper wires, switches, LEDs, resistors, and a handful of 7400-series chips. I've

It's not clear to me what advantage this board has over a couple breadboards, jumper wires, switches, LEDs, resistors, and a handful of 7400-series chips. I've done most of the exercises mentioned on the page with my son using the material mentioned above (culminating in a simple 4-bit ALU made from discrete chips), and it was straightforward. As others have said, the fact that this is all being emulated by a microcontroller feels like cheating. If you're going to emulate, why not just use a circuit simulator like Logisim?