Today we (my two daugthers, 7 and 10 and myself) tried the glowing house kit by BareConductive (you can get it for 25EUR at exp-tech in Europe).
It comes as a nice package with a good (english) instruction. You fold and glue together a paper house (without hot glue) and then assemble a circuit built out of two LEDs, a battery, a resistor, a light-sensor and a transistor. The pieces are held in place by tape and with the conductive ink – after 15 minutes waiting the connections between the pieces are also done with the ink.
In a sense it’s much easier as with soldering, but as the space is a little bit dense and the components are small it can be tricky for kids to do it completely by themselves. But with a little help they managed to build everything – the result looked quite nice and worked really well:
As nice as it is i also see a few disadvantages to teach kids electronics that way. First – the circuit with the transistor is not really an easy one. Something with just a LED and a resistor would have been better to explain electronics to my little one. And – although the conductive ink is really smart – working on a breadboard with real wire might do a better job in experimenting and getting the effects of electrons flowing – because it has immediate response whereas the ink has to dry 15 minutes before it gets conductive.
Making connected stuff 