i would have peed my pants with happiness if someone had got me that when i was a little gal. i loved magnetics kits and legos. somehow at birthdays i always got nothing but barbies and hair doodads, though, so my dad and mom had to donate those to goodwill and got me the cool stuff on their own.

I actually live in fear of the marketing folks getting ahold of this. If they sell it to Mattel, it’ll be repackaged with an earnest little boy on the cover, in color shades of grey, green, and brown.

But you had to read and follow the instructions if you wanted the thing to work. Otherwise you would miss some of the biggest thrills: the vacuum tubes lighting and warming for the first time, or “breaking the iron curtain” (as we used to say) by picking up a short-wave broadcast from eastern Europe, in a strange language you couldn’t understand.

I don’t recall learning much about circuits, though. If there was a section of the instructions explaining how the thing worked, I probably just skipped over that part.

http://www.samstoybox.com/toys/ElectronicProjectKits.html

it has the components mounted permanently in a nice wood box with spring terminals to make interconnections. i loved it. i don’t have my original one, but i did get one from a friend in college. i still have that one.

the snap circuits seems great in that the actual circuit is laid out so it matches the actual circuit diagram. nice. the 100 in one kit has all the components fixed in the box, so wires run all over willy-nilly. makes it harder to trouble shoot circuits, but there are a whole lot more components with which to make stuff.

The really bizarre thing is that this is a great product with a terrible web site. They have marketing issues.

The kit doesn’t provide the kind of explanations parents want to help teach what’s going on. (Physicists know all that stuff so don’t need ‘em).

You can buy the student manuals from the web site but you typically need 2-3 manuals, depending on the kit (standard plus extensions). They explain more. You can also download some PDF documentation. The manuals are a bargain, but they’re damned hard to find.

It’s hard to explain what a mess the web sites are (yes, plural, different domains, some odd relationship to a retail outlet, school focused vs. end-user, incomplete descriptions, etc).

All I can guess is that Snap Circuits is produced by an eccentric pair of aged EEs who are brilliant but completely clueless about marketing and the web! They need to engage a local high school student to clean things up!