At first glance, there’s something undeniably old fashioned about the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts. The organizations have legacies that stretch back more than a hundred years to the days when boys were taught to tramp through the woods and girls were taught to keep a tidy home. Today some 4 million kids still wear those iconic cloth sashes dotted with merit badges—a tradition first introduced by the Boy Scouts in 1911 and the Girl Scouts in 1912.
But if you look more closely at each embroidered round, you’ll discover that the scouts have been anything but static over the last century. The ever-changing roster of Girl Scout and Boy Scout merit badges forms an accidental history of American childhood, a record of what it has meant for girls and boys to “be prepared”—the eternal scouting motto—through two world wars, the Cold War and the War on Terror, through the birth of television, the dawn of the Space Age and the arrival of the internet. Often these boys and girls were our advance scouts: Boys earned a merit badge in automobiling in 1911, when barely one percent of the population owned a car. Girls earned one in Civics in preparation for the vote; it was renamed the Citizen badge with the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
