You mean these?
http://parts.igem.org/Help:An_Introduction_to_BioBricks
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Yeah just like my boxes of microscope slides that my nephews don’t appreciate yet.
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This NEEDS to be a new television series!
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This version isn’t new; Radio Shack started selling this model in the 1988 catalog. As a kid I had the 1982 version, which had the battery bay on the bottom and an uglier front panel but was otherwise the same. Now, was anyone here lucky enough to have 1993’s 300-in-1 kit??
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“K I L L M E.”
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I remember having one of these as as a kid. But like Donald Petersen, said, I followed the directions but didn’t actually learn much. http://www.frantone.com/Mr_Wizard/Mr_Wizard.html
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Star Simpson does an awesome job of updating them:
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I’m mildly surprised it wasn’t already a Twilight Zone episode… although it seems to me that it was part of several of them.
The fun way to do it is to downplay the most obvious theological indicators, and just make the kid a regular kid. Sure, the kit’s assembly can take six days, but the important thing to me is the kid’s petulance about his creation, and his insistence that the world’s denizens live according to his somewhat arbitrary standards (he wipes 'em all out at one point when most of “the batch” strays too far from his liking, but keeps a few “good” ones alive to re-seed the population), that those denizens recognize and worship him, and that everything progress according to his own self-serving rules, including the fact that he has an opponent who knows from the outset that he’s doomed to lose. (That guy just hates playing with the kid, so I guess him mom makes him do it for some reason or other. Heh. They’re probably cousins.)
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Somewhat relatedly, there was a short story (“The Seventh Sally”) by the Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem (more famous in the West for his novel “Solaris”) in which a deposed dictator was given a city in a box as his plaything. This story ended up influencing Will Wright to create Sim City.
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Ah man as a kid I soooo wanted one of those super fancy spring terminal kits. I did end up getting the crystal radio kit as a birthday present which I loved. I never did get one of the fancy ones.
These days, I can’t say I recommend these kits – even for beginners. It’s much more fun and satisfying to use just use a solderless breadboard. Get that and a a grab bag of components and you can do all kinds of fun and wonderful stuff.
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Elenco also makes the now popular Snap Circuits. I like the Snap Circuits a bit more, but did have fun with my ##in1 kit when I was a kid.
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We must be looking at different things:
"Product Description
Complete greenhouse system for cultivating plants and vegetables in an “indoor” environment without soil using a modern Hydroponics system. The kit comes with a base adjustable translucent observation cover four growing trays fertilizer tank safe chemicals and bedding for propagating the growth of plants."
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I had one very similar, but I’m guessing by the “LED Digital Display” that this one is a slight update. I kept the box for years but not for much good - I’d occasionally strip out some part that I needed for something else. I guess it taught me enough to give me confidence to use those parts!
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That looks SOOOOOOOOOO familiar.
I loved that little crystal earpiece.
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