The best Arduino projects are those that look like OLD Legos
And I mean OLD Legos.
This summer, the Smarter Circuitry Blog published its choice of the Top 5 Arduino Back-To-School Projects for 2021: a LED Cube, a Useless Box, a Shuttle Mission Control Mock-Up for Kids, a LED Hourglass and a Magic Dome.
The cheapest, but most labor-intensive one may be the first, that only requires a soldering iron and cheap components.
But my favourite project is the USELESS one
The “Useless Box” listed in that post is not useless at all:
Instead, and precisely by doing very little “as is”, it is very useful for the same reason why “generic” LEGO boxes are immensely more valuable, and fun, than single-purpose LEGO kits:
unlike the “Mission Control” thing, both those old LEGO sets, and that modern “Useless” box, leave much, much more space for creativity and customization, not to mention reuse.
Never fall for toys, projects, “kits” that are only good for ONE thing, or only allow one kind of usage. Not if your goal is learning or having fun, that is.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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