My sister has asked that I get my eldest niece (aged 7) an electronics kit for Christmas. Sort of like a Meccano set but with circuit boards, one of those “build your own…”

It’s apparently what she wants and she’s quite into creative stuff like that so while I’m hunting through Amazon and other online retailers, any recommendations from experience?

Seems there’s loads of options from a few pounds up to hundreds. I’m wondering if she might be just about old enough for the Turing Tumble https://www.turingtumble.com/ so if anyone has used one before it’d be good to hear.

Over to you, oh parents of STW!

Can she solder? (Or are you prepared to teach her?)

If so then there are lots of nice little soldering projects from sparkfun, madlab etc

Like these I have scattered around my WFH desk:

If not then maybe something like Hot Wires (aka Snap Circuits) is a good place to start?

Hot Wires is fabulous stuff.

my kids enjoyed the hotwires sets

The hotwires stuff looks good

I gave my daughter a sparkfun Arduino set once which is a combination of programming and electronics but I think that is next level really.  At 7 I would start much simpler and work up.  The sparkfun stuff is great when it works but difficult to debug if it doesn’t unless you have the skillz

Hot wires fans here!