If your student wants to make their prototype permanent, you can actually buy perf boards that are oriented like solderless breadboards. They come in different shapes and sizes, or you can cut them down to size. This makes it easy to solder the components in place just as you have them on the prototyping board.

Your breadboard does look small. It's great for little projects that you want to save, but your kids might soon outgrow it with more complicated circuits. If you want "room to grow" you might consider this one. And I'd buy one for each kid so they don't need to take turns. When you are starting out, I think it's a great idea to get an assortment of resistors as it's much cheaper than buying them one size at a time. I also love how "Joe Knows" are so nicely organized into a box. It makes everything easier to find. I also use the jumper wires you ordered, but I also use these Elenco wires because they lie flush to the breadboard and make debugging much, much easier. I even bought additional yellow and orange ones because they are just the right size to connect rows to the power rails. Don't forget if you don't already own one: a pair of needle nose pliers and a pair of wire cutters. These will make wiring up circuits much easier. Good luck!

We just graduated from Charles Platt's Make: Electronics so if you need help sourcing components or just have questions, feel free to post here or PM me. Amazon is actually great for this purpose, and is my first stop.

I just found it, but I'm not sure there is color coding for electrolytic capacitors. In my experience, those caps have the farads printed directly on it. If you want to replicate the experiment in real life you can go to Amazon and buy a box of assorted caps organized into little bags and experiment with different ones. Or just ask Jack, the EEME guy.

I couldn't find the caps you linked to, but I would just email Jack at EEME and ask him. He's a very nice guy and happy to help.

Not a Dickens fan (hated Great Expectations), but I do enjoy Christmas Carol. I admire the Fezziwigs and how they use their wealth to spread cheer to their employees. I think there's some historical value to the book, too. I hope more knowledgeable members can chime in, but isn't this book largely responsible for how we celebrate Christmas today?

Make Electronics by Charles Platt will keep you busy for about a year. We just finished it and we're moving on to volume 2. Also we're starting on Arduino. And we bought an oscilloscope. In fact, I'd recommend you buy an o-scope now. I wish I'd had it when we were doing the Make experiments. I'm also thinking about ham radio.

One of my dd's is pretty strong with Python with the exception of OOP. She needs more practice creating and using classes. What are some good beginning to intermediate projects that make use of classes, inheritance, encapsulation, and all that good stuff?

Just to be clear, MathCounts has been only welcoming to our homeschool team. But there are other math organizations who do make me jump through hoops just because my kids are homeschooled, and after all these years it's starting to wear on me.

I had never heard of a "signing" or a "signing party" until this thread. Keep in mind that a full ride athletic scholarship, from what I understand, is not just free money. Those poor kids must earn their keep while in school, and often their school work suffers for it. Maybe others know more about college student athletes and can elaborate on their academic lives?

Since the topic of whether the name of the school (undergrad or grad) matters in hiring, I thought I'd throw this anecdote into the mix, just to confuse everyone. My dh's company recently hired someone for a technical VP level position. This person has no college at all. Just amazing work experience. I suggest you follow your path. Do good work. Hope for the best.

While I understand that the book is written directly to the student, I don't feel like my kids are ready for that level of self-study, and I certainly didn't have that level of independence when I was in high school, let alone middle school. So, we read through the problems together, and try to solve them socratically. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't. Then we read through the solutions together, whether we get them right or not, just to make sure we didn't miss any important points. Then my dd's work through the exercises independently. We check their work and review the problems they got wrong. They do 1 section per day. Then I allow 1-2 days for review problems and 1-2 days for challenge problems at the end of each chapter. Sometimes it takes them longer, especially for dd13 who is in geometry. The videos are nice, but they are time-consuming and didn't add all that much to the info in the text, so I wouldn't sweat missing them. When the novelty wore off we stopped watching them.

Since there are few people following this thread, I wanted to point out that I successfully wired up an electret microphone and op amp to generate sound waves readable by the scope as described in this tutorial. Then I downloaded a tuning fork app that generated some nice sine waves. We could see the amplitude increase with higher volume and frequency increase with higher pitch. It's a very cool demo. I also learned that I need to be more patient and methodical when using the device. If I turn a knob, I need to wait a few seconds sometimes before the screen updates to reflect the changes. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out which way I need to adjust the horizontal and vertical scales just by looking at the screen, so I feel like I'm adjusting blindly. I have a copy of the Mims book recommended here, and will try some of those soon. ETA: link to tuning fork app

I don't remember what materials for BFSU I bought at HST, but I used them a lot. If you have a copy of the book in front of you, look at the "Materials" section of each lesson to see what you will be needing, and look to see if it's on sale at HST. I wish I had been so organized!

Okay, now this is odd. How is coding anything at all like speaking and reading a foreign language?

I'm guessing the UCs don't care as much about attracting homeschoolers as they care about attracting out-of-state/out-of-country students who pay full freight. It's the sad outcome of declining state funding for UCs. I wonder how foreign students and non-Californians deal with a-g?

My high school math teacher would tell us, "Memorization is a mathematical malpractice." I take that to heart. To wit, today my dd asked me to remind her if 3-1 equals 1/3. Instead of just telling her, I went through the AoPS rationale for 3-1. Start with 33 = 27 32=9 31=3 30=1 3-1 = ?? what is the pattern? This also reminds me of the snarky comments made by smart kids in my high school math class, along the lines of, "I forgot the formula on the exam, so I derived it." :glare:

I want to have Thanksgiving at YOUR house. LOL!

I wonder if you can hook up an -scope to an electric guitar or a digital piano?

CS is not generally considered a "science" by public schools which is one reason it is rare for California schools to even offer any sort of programming class. Because it is considered an "elective," it isn't required for graduation and students aren't encouraged by school officials to take it. Having said that, I think learning to code not only teaches you how to code, but there's also this meta-learning that one gains: learning how to use logic and quantitative reasoning to teach a machine to do something that comes naturally to human brains. It's just too bad that archaic graduation requirements can't keep up with real life. (And I'm glad to be homeschooling!)

We use flashcards for MCT vocabulary. We remove words that have been mastered and add new words for each new lesson. If she misses a word on a test, then that word goes back into the flash card pile. It probably doesn't seem fun, but I LOVE flash cards. It's like a little stack of knowledge, lol.

I agree AoPS is not the be-all end-all route to becoming an engineer. And of course, AoPS was not around when I went to school. However, I and many others did have an AoPS-like math education. I was lucky to have a math teacher to prepped us with old AHSME exams and sprinkled challenging problems on his math tests. We were all expected to take the AHSME for reals every year, too. Those problem solving skills served me very well in college. But you're right, too.

Thank you! I just got a glimpse inside the book from Amazon and this is just what I need. You've come to my rescue twice now. Maybe someday I'll repay you. If you ever need help with AoPS or BFSU, I'm on it, lol!

We own an oscilloscope. My middle school kids who have had pretty decent exposure to electronics. They can wire up a breadboard using a schematic. They know the difference between AC and DC. They've made crystal radios. Low pass and high pass filters. I thought it would be great if they learned how to use an o-scope, as I'd never seen one before college. Are there any fun easy projects that use an oscilloscope that would be appropriate for students? Thank you for your help!

Good advice. Thank you for sharing.