Robotistan/PicoBricks: Pico Bricks is a fantastic project development kit for STEM educators and makers of all levels
https://github.com/Robotistan/PicoBricks
Pico Bricks is a fantastic project development kit for STEM educators and makers of all levels
The $25 Computer - Tech Europe - WSJ
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/11/22/the-25-computer
Called Raspberry Pi, think of it as Meccano for the digital generation.
The Life of Kenneth: So You Want to Build Electronics
http://kennethfinnegan.blogspot.com/2011/06/so-you-want-to-build-electronics.html
So here is a gigantic list of everything I would buy right now to replace my entire workshop if mine were to disappear. I'm going to try and separate it into some sort of reasonable order as far as importance, but the point is that you see all of this, and use it as inspiration to put together your own collection.
Tinkering: all summer at the Exploratorium
http://www.exploratorium.edu/tinkering
"Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don't quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity.
When you tinker, there are no instructions — but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It's about figuring out how things work and reworking them.
Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony—this is the stuff of tinkering."
Hackers Don’t Tinker Because They Got Invited | Smarterware
http://smarterware.org/4941/hackers-dont-tinker-because-they-got-invited
"Because while we're all ranting about how closed the iPad will be, the jailbreak community is planning competitions to see who can crack it first. The sun isn't setting on tinkerers; their desire to crack things open intensifies when faced with something that's closed by design. The challenge is part of the appeal."
The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Losing the Right to Tinker?
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16084,294,p1.html
"The new year could see new challenges to hardware reverse engineering."