The Crafty Kid’s Guide with Helen Leigh

In this episode, I am talking to Helen Leigh – she is a creative technologist, author and maker with a focus on playful use of new technologies. For this episode, we’re focusing on one of her creations, which is The Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics – a book she has written which is filled which awesome projects for parents and their kids.

Helen is so many things in one person: hacker, writer, musician, presenter, educator, artist & nerd. If you take a look at her recent tweets, you’ll see that she’s really doing so many diverse things.

Besides having written multiple books, she’s also publishing for Hackspace Magazine, National Geographic and Intel. For the Royal Court of Oman, she has created a Design, Coding, and Electronics Course and over in Europe, in London, she lectures on electronics, physical computing, and music technology.

Images: Copyright Helen Leigh – used with permission

She is also creating creative technology products with a focus on education – one example is the MINI·MU glove. It is a make-it-yourself musical glove for kids. It is a collaboration between herself, the musician Imogen Heap, Pimoroni and the MI·MU glove team. This kit uses the popular, versatile BBC micro:bit to create a friendly, simple and fun crafty code experience.

A bit more info about the Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics – a book she published with McGraw Hill: it includes 20 DIY projects and the first part of the book begins with super easy to make paper circuits – those are easy circuits that use typically copper foil and it helps your kids to understand the basics of electricity in a really fun way. Next she introduces soft circuits using conductive thread, wearables and then finally robots. The book is really filled with great explanations, too and it’s very inspiring to read.