Together with a more than a handful of OM’s from local ham radio clubs, we united ourselves into an activity that has successfully developed into being a permanent one. Our target is to provide access to electronics and software tinkering to youth students, ages 9 years and up. We decided to call this activity “Tüftel-Treff“, which translates into “tinkering meet” or similar.
“Tüfteln” as a German verb is an activity that especially South-Western Germans (Swabian) are well-known for, ans also proud of: identifying a problem, sticking with it until it’s understood and eventually overcome.
The idea to invest effort into youth to show them basics of electronics, soldering together small circuits, having fun with the output (which the kids take home with them always) and to give them a chance to show off with class-mates, obviously has a distinct intention. We’re all technicians or engineers, and we realize that youth is less and less interested in “how stuff is made” and getting into doing things. This reveals ever less MINT students, and ever less amateur radio enthusiasts. All of which leaves us said and worried… we have to do something.
So, we do something!
We teamed up with our city-run youth activity team (Stadtjugendring) in Ulm (that’s our city). They have a nice web-site, newsletters, all types of other activities, and they have a massive distribution list. Whenever there is some activity, it gets posted into this distribution list, probably a thousand of parents read this, and they convince their children that signing them up would be great fun and a good idea.
Typically, from advertising a Tüftel-Treff activity to being fully booked takes them less than 30 minutes; truly stunning.
So far we used kits from electronics vendors. These come with ready-made PCB’s, all needed parts are included. However, the build instructions typically don’t match with our participants and are more designed for grown-ups. So we substitute this with a more youth-friendly description made in Power-Point, handed-out as hardcopy, which describe all building steps one by one.
Prior to working with the printed PCB we do soldering exercises with a experiment PCB and resistors in order to exercise or re-capture “how to solder well“.
Check out https://tueftel-treff.de/, and if you want to know more or share your insights, drop me a mail dm4ab@darc.de
