Adafruit, the DIY electronics website and marketplace, is espousing the popular strategy of “get em’ young” with a new live action short video series broadcast on YouTube. The series, called Circuit Playground, takes an alphabetical approach to teaching kids about the basics of circuits, components and concepts that will come in handy if the tots watching have aspirations of becoming electrical engineers, or just of building their own hobby projects at home.
The inaugural episode covers amperes, the unit of measurement for electric current flowing through a circuit. The co-hosts are Adabot, an adorable robot puppet helping keep the kids entertained, and Adafruit founder Limor Fried, providing easy-to-follow, but not patronizing explanations of the concepts involved. The intro features a number of animated characters representing circuit components, and there’s even a special guest appearance from André-Marie Ampère, after whom the ampere is named, so there’s an element of science history in the mix, too.
At less than 5 minutes, you also won’t have to keep your kids focused too long to take in the message. And if you’re a big kid who might not be all that well versed in the basics of circuits and electronics, you’ll probably learn something, too.