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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

The Web browser handles all of the kerning and line-spacing, not the forum back-end. These can all be adjusted in CSS stylesheets by the website owner though.

I don't know if this is an exhaustive list - they're adding new CSS properties all the time - but it shows some of the tweaks you can make to an HTML text block in CSS.

https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_text_spacing.asp

Proud dad moment here, but also a realization about the original topic.

First, my 5 yo daughter was soldering her first chips to a board yesterday! I soldered two corners to show her how it's done, then she did all the rest while I held the board down. I think she did really good for a 5 yo!

But I learned something from this: Any kid who doesn't know a lick about soldering or what is expected will do very similar stuff, or worse. Look at how the solder went right through the hole onto the top of the board even! This could happen to a kid of any age, even high school, or adult "kids" I suppose. I think it's not just skill but expectation. "I put it onto the board, it should work immediately, right?" Wrong. And what if the chip orientation was backwards, ah! No repairing that!

So, with this, I am closing my mini-dream of a making a solder-it-yourself kit for high school kids. Without supervision/instruction, prior knowledge, or immediate feedback, something small like a 4"x4" board is far too much to expect from a complete novice. I think kits are great, and I know high school or even 1st graders can be *taught* how to solder correctly. But to be taught means they need an instructor, a master, and not just a book (or some youtube videos). Folks like me who learn how to solder on their own is mostly done through mistakes and self-projects, where if I mess it up, I'm not out anything for it and no 'technical support' was ever expected.

I think this ended up being an imagination vs. reality conflict. I just imagine that everyone else out there has the ability to self-learn, but in reality many folks, young or old, are not able to self-learn without learning how to do that first through a instructor. [ I guess that's why I have a job as a math teacher after all. ]

There's my conclusion. Thank you everyone.

Chad

Looks great to me for a 5 year old...

But don't be put off. I teach kids to swim and sometimes some take longer than others - think the worst that might happen here - a small burn or it doesn't work first time. I can drown kids if I'm not careful... But at the other end - today I had a class of 4 and 5 year olds do their first little swims without floats - small wins for a long mentoring process to get them there... I also had one 9 year old who wouldn't get in the water, so you win some, lose some...


So expectations... There are/have been many kits sold in the UK to introduce people to soldering - simple stuff like little LED lights in an xmas tree shape and so on - can still go wrong (LEDs in the wrong way), but they are cheap (usually < £10) and easy to fix. Also things called Pi Jams (originally to do with the Raspberry Pi, but some migrated into generic "Tech" Jams) with lots of people coming to do "stuff" and/or show off stuff, also people on-hand to mentor others doing things like soldering... Lockdown sort of closed off many of them, but some are re-starting again.

So after-school clubs? Some schools here have what they call "Enrichment" activities - stuff not on the curriculum, but time is allocated for it - like computing, robots, etc...


Also, look at the RC2014 - it's not a favourite of mine (Z80 vs. 6502 and all that but it's small, manageable boards. I know someone (here I think?) has a 6502 board for it, but something like that might work.

Don't give up hope..

Cheers,

-Gordon

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Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

Thanks Gordon, I appreciate it. I'm not, um, discouraged as much as seeing reality finally. My main point is that I was hoping to have a solder-it-yourself kit with an instruction manual and maybe a couple of youtube videos and say, "Alright, now you do it, for the first time ever, alone!" But that just isn't a plan for success. Like you said, there are much cheaper kits for learning how to solder. So, anything here in 6502-land would be an intermediate soldering project at least, if not more. Which means the target consumer already has some experience in this sort of thing, which was not my target audience to begin with. It's like a Catch-22 in a way: Someone needs to have experience in soldering before taking on my kit, but my kit is designed for those without any experience.

Of course, I don't mind having plans for my boards as just general kits for hobbyists, that's fine of course. But there is a reason why teachers exist: To impart knowledge onto folks who don't yet have it.

All in all, I'm still learning

Thank you for the encouragement.

Chad

You are probably too young to experienced Heathkit, but a whole generation of hobbyists and electronics professional had started with Heathkits as teenagers without soldering nor electronic skills. You can find old Heathkit manuals online and use that as references for beginners. If kids can figured out how to ride a bike without major mishaps, soldering is easy by comparison.
Bill

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!