The Updated Young People’s Electronics Kit

In the past, children learned about electric circuits and electronic devices and how they worked by building them from electronics kits – wires, resistors, LEDs, transistors, and so on, with a plastic base on which to attach them. Electronics clubs for elementary school children provided the definitions for the symbols that represented the various components in the electrical circuit diagrams. In our own day, with electronic devices becoming more intuitive to operate, but less intuitive when it comes to understanding the processes that operate them, two projects are attempting to make electronics more accessible to the general public.

Denki Puzzle is a project by Japanese artist Yuri Suzuki, who is active in London and Stockholm (and who, in November, participated in an international conference in memory of Alex Ward, Curator of Design and Architecture at the Israel Museum). At the request of London’s Design Museum, Suzuki created new symbols for components, which provide an intuitive understanding of what the component does, and he constructed components from circuits printed in the form of the symbols that he designed. Thus, instead of looking at a drawing, identifying the symbols, mentally translating them into components, and constructing the circuit from them, the symbols are simultaneously the components, and the electrical circuit diagram is at the same time the circuit itself. The components are connected by means of special slots, without the need for soldering. “Through the process of assembly,” writes Suzuki on his website, “an understanding and  appreciation of the building blocks of more complex technologies is gained.”

Chibitronics is a Crowd-Supply project by Dr. Andrew “Bunny” Wang, an American hacker and MIT graduate living in Singapore, and Jie Qi, a doctoral student at MIT’s Media Laboratory. The project inserts electronic components into flexible stickers, which can be peeled off and stuck to various surfaces in order to create electrical circuits, again without the need for soldering. Wang writes on his site: “Although flex circuit technology is commonplace inside consumer products — there’s probably a half dozen examples of flex PCB inside your mobile phone — it’s underrepresented in hobby & DIY products.”

Qi writes about the product that “these thin, lightweight, flexible and sticky circuit boards allow us to craft electronic interactivity onto new spaces and interfaces such as books, clothing, walls, and even our bodies!” The project, which has been running for the past two months, ended up by raising over 68 thousand dollars, and the first stickers are expected to reach purchasers in May of this year.