Adafruit offers children electronics lessons on YouTube

Adafruit, a company founded in 2005 by engineer Limor Fried, has begun offering a free educational program for children on YouTube.

It's called Circuit Playground and the aim is to teach children the basics of how electricity works—it will follow an alphabetical approach—the first episode is called "A is for Ampere."

Limor Fried

Fried (the first female engineer to appear on the cover of Wired magazine) states on her website that her goal for Adafruit is to create the best possible place online for those seeking to learn more about how electronics work and then to make and offer the best electronic products for people of all ages and knowledge levels to help them in their efforts.

She appears in the video series as LadyAda (a nod to both computer programming pioneer Ada Lovelace and popular entertainer Lady Gaga), along with other puppet characters that represent different electronic components.

As she explains to the puppets how different aspects of electricity work, those watching learn too. In the inaugural video, LadyAda explains to a character called Adabot what an ampere is (and gets some help from a stand-in for André-Marie Ampère himself) and why it's important in electronics.

She also uses real-world examples of whatever she's talking about, in action—turning on a boom-box for example.

The video is short, just shy of four minutes, which means little ones watching won't have to focus very long.

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