Agreed. I think there's a lot to be learned from building a driver, if only for the powerful experience of realizing that there's nothing magical about it. Just

Agreed. I think there's a lot to be learned from building a driver, if only for the powerful experience of realizing that there's nothing magical about it. Just a magnet and a coil of wire. It's the equivalent a CS guy designing a rudimentary processor: it won't be necessary be good enough to beat out commercial stuff, but it sure does convince you that the thing you take for granted really can be done with just transistors/magnets and wire. I for one would have loved to do this kind of activity as a kid: it's a pretty simple concept that puts a whole lot of power in your hands and exposes interesting questions. It looks like Bose is doing something in this space at kids science camps [0]. If you can acquire/make an amp and a strobe light to replace their "blue box", there's a whole host of kid-friendly activities on the site to do with kids centered around making hand-made, origami paper drivers. [0] http://build.bose.com/ http://build.bose.com/