Helena has decided pulling things apart is fun. We had a free view box that no longer works.

It’s hard to teach kids about Electronics when this is what they look like. I remember making a radio that I had to solder but there weren’t that many pieces and it wasn’t a difficult map but these…

I just can’t do that smashing, breaking thing so it was all a controlled, ordered correct screwdrivers process where we have kept all the pieces, including the teeny weeny screws.

But the slowness can’t have put her off as a few days later her and her friend pulled apart the DVD VCR thing… it was way better, mechanical and electrical.

They wanted to keep some of the parts, and some of those parts happened to be the same, so I said my DVD VCR so my pieces! But I actually wanted them, dunno what for though. I just like how the thing with ball bearings moves (we did moving the lid with marbles analogy). Helena wanted the copper, but because she couldn’t “have” them she drew them.

The T is to orient them so she knew which way things went when she drew them. The child who says she can’t “draw” can when it’s NOT drawing! She even put the shadows on.

We tried to unsolder the resistors etc but were unsuccessful. We imagined the factories producing all the little bits and tried to find the weirdest part… some things took a lot of work and perseverance to pull apart. I had to take advice from the younger explorers and bang some things with a hammer. We had to unscrew with pliers at one point. The mechanical bit was fun, it looked like arms moving and had actual grease, “ewww”…

Yesterday we pulled apart some toys, tested the battery voltage, the kids wrote down the battery codes and we walked to the DIY store to get them, and screwed and sewed the new batteries back in. The torch, which has a totally understandable circuit, goes and the frog once again has a suitably annoying croak. Annoying?