RadioShack used to sell kids this madness

Before you wire anything on the bench, watch someone open the real box. The Modern Rogue's video on the RadioShack Science Fair kits is the best twelve minutes of context we have found: the cardboard tray, the spring terminals, the lab-type manual with its numbered projects, and the particular joy of a nine-year-old being handed a nine-volt battery and a speaker and told to go make noise.

A few things to watch for, because they are the things this site is built around.

The springs. Every part sits between two coiled terminals and you bend a spring back with a fingertip to trap a bare wire end. No solder, no breadboard, no clip. That is why our board has numbered springs and why a circuit here is nothing more than a list of spring pairs. The manual said "connect 1 to 5, 6 to 28," and so does ours.

The manual. Each project had a wiring list, a schematic, and a paragraph on why it worked. That paragraph is what most of us skipped as kids, and it is the part the shop teacher here will not let you skip. Pass a project and the manual asks you to explain it in your own words before it is signed off.

The smoke. The video is honest about what happens when you get it wrong. So is the simulator: put the LED straight across the battery and it burns, and the button beside the board changes to Replace burnt parts. Nothing here can hurt you, but things can definitely break.

If the video makes you want to touch one, the closest we can offer is the 30 in ONE on the bench. Experiment 1 is the same first project every one of those kits opened with: a battery, a resistor, an LED, and a button. Then climb the Ladder. The boxes get bigger the same way they did on the shelf.

The photos in our gallery are the same family of kits. Several of them are the very models in the video.

Video by The Modern Rogue, embedded with YouTube's privacy-enhanced player.