Schoolhouse Review Crew: EEME

Recently we had an opportunity to review Project Genius Light from EEME.




EEME was founded by a dad who was unhappy with the choices of educational toys available.  He wanted to find things for children to do that would not only be fun but also instill the deeper knowledge of how things work, get kids to ask "why", and be able to teach others.  Soon EEME was born.

EEME is a series of hands on projects for 7-12 year old that are designed to teach them how to build technology around them.  It is a subscription program in which you are shipped a project kit in the mail every month on the 1st of the month or the next business day.  Each month's project builds on the one before it. You will reuse some of the previous month's components, such as the breadboard and the battery pack, plus receive whatever new pieces you need to complete the project in that month's kit.  The projects are taught step by step by watching online videos.  There are even interactive quiz questions included in the online instruction.

There are 5 different monthly projects in an EEME subscription.  They are:

Genius Light-22 lessons-assemble a LED circuit system that lights up when it is dark and dims when it is light
DIY Display-33 lessons- segmented LED's wire up a personal switch panel
Tentacles-26 lessons-learn about transistors
Fade to Black -15 lessons-learn about capacitators and build a dimming light circuit that stays lit even when battery is disconnected
Tune-16 lessons-learn how to use a potentiometer and transistor to make a tunable Genius Light

A subscription costs $18.95 per month.  You can subscribe by clicking here.   You can subscribe to the online video lessons for free by clicking here.


We received the first project Project Genius Light



I used the Project Genius Light with my 11 and 9 year old boys.  We split the project up into two sections completing 11 lessons the first session and the rest in the second session.  I sat with the boys as they completed the project, but honestly I didn't help do anything, they did it all on their own and took turns as to who was doing the project work for each step.

One of the first things I really liked about EEME was that everything we needed came with the project.  I did not have to buy or add a single thing to it.  It even came with the battery. The quality of the bread board and the baseboard were very good.  I thought that the video instruction did a great job showing and telling the boys exactly what they needed to do.  Parents do not need to have any electronics or engineering experience at all, the videos teach everything the child needs to know.  If it took the boys a little longer then the instructor to put the wires into the necessary slot in the bread board, it was very easy to pause the video until they were through and then start it up again. There are also written notes beside the video if you need to double check where the wires are supposed to be placed.  I really liked that it got the children working in the project right from the start without giving a whole lot of background information.  It got them interested right away, and then after they had a chance to do complete a section, they gave a good explanation for the hows and whys.  I also liked the questions that were woven into the lessons to show whether or not the boys were understanding what it was they were learning.

They were very excited that it lit up the first time they tried!

We had a bit of work to do to complete the project after that, but the boys were excited that had followed the directions correctly and it lit up.

The finished project looked like this.  I did not remember to get a picture of the bread board before they closed it up.  The genius light works just as it is supposed to.

The only difficulty we had was when we got to a good stopping point after our first session I logged out and thought it was supposed to save our place where we left off in the video instruction.  When we logged back in though it did not start us where we left off.  I had to figure out which video segment we watched last and restart it from there.

The boys really enjoyed completing the Project Genius Light from EEME.  To see what my Crew Mates had to say, click on the banner below.