Spent the evening with seven-year-old Isabella at one of the Hackers on a Train 2012 soldering workshops. She chose one of the more ambitious kits, which will be no surprise to anyone who knows her, and we got about halfway through a Gamby video-game kit incorporating an LCD screen, joystick, speaker, and the like. This is after she completed the Diavolino kit which will provide the computational horsepower. (The Diavolino is an Arduino-clone, and the Gamby is a daughterboard.)

I’m awfully tired now, and I made her do almost all of the soldering at that. She’s a very intense and intently focused girl who wants to know everything about everything, and while it is very rewarding to help her figure things out it is also a lot of work! Oh, well, somebody has to train up the next generation, and this way I get to “pay forward” all the time people spent helping me learn when I was her age. It’s also deeply satisfying to get to see the little gears in her head turn and watch her put things together and learn how to make her world work.