Helen Leigh - The Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics: 20 Fun Projects for Makers, Crafters, and Everyone in Between

Helen Leigh is an author, education writer, and maker with a focus on creative use of new technologies. She has written playful technology education materials for National Geographic, Intel Education, and Adafruit and has developed a Design, Coding, and Electronics Course for the Royal Court of Oman.

Alongside her writing, Helen makes creative technology products with a focus on education, including her latest collaboration with Imogen Heap, MI.MU, and Pimoroni, a gesture-controlled musical instrument glove that you can sew, wire, code, and play. To see some of the things Helen has made and find out more about some of the projects she has worked on, visit her website, www.doitkits.com.

Helen lectures on electronics, physical computing, and music technology at Ravensbourne University and Tileyard Studios in London. She was previously director of the education platform Mission:Explore, with whom she published six acclaimed childrens books.

Helen lives in Berlin but is often found in London. You can say hello, ask questions, or show off your DIY electronics on Twitter (@helenleigh), on YouTube (HelenLeigh), or on Instagram (@helenleigh_makes).

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For my sister, Nicola Picola, despite asking me Hows the book going? way too often.

O ur imaginations drive us all through our lives. We spend our days learning and our nights dreaming. We learn how to walk, how to run, how to dance, how to add and subtract, and how to read. We go to school to learn, and we learn from the wider world outside. We learn when we work and, perhaps more importantly, we learn when we play. The things we learn, the stories we tell, the art we makethese things all mesh together to help us understand our lives and let us express who we are to the world.

Inside each of us there is a creative spark, a little fire that burns a bit brighter every time we learn something new that inspires us. This book is all about creative technology, about using design, art, fashion, music, science, and play all together. Its about making things that can be beautiful and practical, as well as fun and silly. Its about taking a needle and thread and mapping out a patchwork constellation to shine above you at night. Its about telling your own stories, creating your own practical arts and crafts and learning how to stitch together your own magic.

Everything youre going to read about here in this book is something you can already do. Helen wont sit you down and dictate things to you; she wants to show you how to look at things in a new way for yourself. Her ideas are all about taking one skill, one way of expressing yourselfwhether its sewing or origami or drawingand building on that. But more importantly, her ideas are about building up that little fire that was already there inside you and giving you the confidence and the help to look at technology and invent the future yourself.

In this book youll find out how to make a pair of magic gloves you share with your best friend, a robot that wakes you up in the morning, and a paper skyline that looks like your own home town at nightor even a city that never existed, except in your own imagination. Its so exciting to think of you taking your first steps into the creative world of electronics.