Re: Not as good idea as it sounds...
I bought my daughter one of those push-it-together electronic kits a year ago, when she was five.
She hasn't designed anything new, but she has come up with a few innovative uses for the circuits in the kit. My favourite is a set of alternating flashing leds under some tissue paper to simulate a camp fire in a forest diorama.
Most new stuff in this world is really stuff that isn't new being used or combined in new ways. DAB, for instance, is a combination of digitisation, compression, and wireless radio; nothing there that is less than forty years old. Modern innovators such as Sinclair and Dyson found fame and fortune by making new things out of stuff that already existed, used differently.
This is what children should be learning; how to make better use of what we have. When they reach the limits of what is available to them (by which time they won't be children anymore) then they will naturally look towards making something new.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
