Doers and makers

Growing up I had friends (ok, my grandpa's friends) who worked on electronics. There was a Radio Shack at every mall where they actually sold parts, not just radio-controlled chotchkies and cell phones.I really had a sense growing up that working on making something is cool. Maybe it's just my own perception... At the same time, I don't think anyone looked at my mom strangely if they found out I had a soldering iron. Now, in comparison, I get the feeling that people would want to take your kids away from you if you gave them something that can melt metal. Shock. Horror.It seemed to peter out in the late eighties through the nineties. It seemed that the way you passed the time at that point was video games or the mall. (Remember malls? Or am I dating myself?) The idea of sitting down to create seemed to fade with the times.In many ways it followed the same trajectory as computer programming. When I started a single person could really understand the machine at all levels. A bit after I started I'm not sure how most kids could get to that point with the added complexity of the systems and languages that were coming out. Before the relative simplicity of Java there was the later versions of C++ which is something that you probably wouldn't want to cut your teeth on. Even then, you could learn a language, but it's not like understanding things more from the computer engineering perspective.That changed with the internet. Suddenly making content -- even just a stupid web site or a MySpace page (you had to do it in HTML, remember all the <blink> tags? Or am I dating myself again?) -- was cool again. There was a new ground floor where you could get in on the action. A new wave of kids excited about creating happened.Then it got lost again as the web got harder to use and people started to consume more and more, rather than creating.A few years back another ground floor emerged -- and this is a throwback to the old -- the idea of making things with electronics. In this case it's not with the bare bones of circuits, but with microcontrollers. The devices finally got cheap enough that you could afford to give your kids something like an Arduino and have them go to town with it. It's easy to start when you can understand most of what you're working with.Admittedly, the kids don't understand the inner workings of the processors or how the I/O is really working, but it's like with HTML -- you don't need to understand all of the abstractions to get productive with it. From there you get 3D printers and all sorts of other cool widgets to lure people in. Once you're interested, you can start digging into how it works at the lower levels.I know I'm being contradictory at times here. Why is it OK to not understand the underpinnings of the system some times but not other times? I guess for me it's when the system stops being just a complex system, but something that's it's own thing by itself -- an evolutionary step change as it were.Opening up a Raspberry Pi I picked up for $25 I can't help but think we're doing something right. :-)