When I was in middle school (~40 years ago) I had a shop teacher who had us do a hands on project- assemble a nightlight using electric plug pins, a resistor, a

When I was in middle school (~40 years ago) I had a shop teacher who had us do a hands on project- assemble a nightlight using electric plug pins, a resistor, an indicator bulb, all encapsulated in resin shaped in an ice cube tray (sorry, I can't find anything online showing it at the moment). The teacher had us do most of the work (soldering) although he handled the resin. He showed us that by using the right value of resistor, the bulb could still make a usably bright light while costing only about $0.10 in electricity a year. Years later, when the shop teacher passed away, it was announced on facebook and many people showed up in the comments to say they still had their nightlights, and that they still worked 40 years later. I had lost mine years before but somebody sent me a photo and I was able to deduce the components and build a new one. The longevity is due to the simplicity and reliability of the components as well as the toughness of resin. Think about that- 40 years later, a bunch of kids who didn't have any deep investment in electronics or shop still had items they had built decades before, that still worked. It gave us a sense of satisfaction and a confidence in our abilities. Many of the most successful folks in the early telecom and scientific instrumentation industry got deep experience doing hand-building of vacuum tubes (typically working at Westinghouse/AT&T in NYC, which was the center of development for that technology, see "The Idea Factory). For example, the inventor of the modern pH meter was a scientist named Beckman who realized he could use the tubes as amplifiers for the tiny signal generated by the hydrogen electrode of the meter, he learned his craft building vacuum tubes by hand. Although I went into computational research and rarely used my hands (except to assemble PCs), in the past few years I've gotten deeply into "making"- including hand workworking (a chisel and a plane are remarkably effective) and gained a lot of enjoyment from the tactile process of building. I often run my hands over wood using my senses to identify high and low points and tiny scratches (the human hand can detect differences as low as 1 micron) and then correct those through scraping and sanding/grinding. In many ways it can be more satisfying as writing a nice code.