If you were ever a Boy Scout, you may recall earning an archery or camping badge. Girl Scouts offer athlete, naturalist, and many others. But what if you’re a kid with serious 3D printing or laser cutting chops? Is there a badge for you?
There is now, thanks to the folks at Adafruit Industries, a New York-based open source hardware and maker products emporium. Starting in the next few days–timed to the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts on March 12–Adafruit will begin offering a broad set of skill badges that reward kids–and presumably others–for completing any of a long list of the kind of tasks that would be right at home at Maker Faire.
Learned to solder? There’s a badge for that. “You sent something to space, almost,” Adafruit offers its high-altitude balloon project badge. Worked on an Android or Linux project? Adafruit has you covered.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
