One thing I think that really drove me as a teenager, and drives me still is my love of doing projects. Projects can be simple, short - they can be as simple as making some sausages, cleaning up a section of the garden or writing some software to do math sheet generation for my nearby school (mathsheetsfor.me) for instance.

This holiday break (Summer is Jan-March here in New Zealand), as I was cleaning up my office of old junk and came across some old mice. Pre-laser style. My 9 year old was helping me and asked me which pile they should go in. I told him to snip the end off with the pliers and put them in the "make" cupboard. He asked me why - I told him about the Mouse Bot I had seen in the 2nd edition of Make Magazine.

That started quite a learning curve for me. We got through the first parts together fairly easily - hollowing out the dead mouse, but the electronics were a bit nastier - particularly as the parts I had available didn't match the project. Particularly difficult were the relay (which ended up needing to be wired up completely different to the diagrams), finding out the original circuit in the magazine was wrong, and getting the right transistor.

All in all, I learnt an awful lot. I particularly learned that soldering wires together is a horrible business and that my 9 year old can solder better than I can. We still don't quite have it working - the bounce circuit seems to have died but given all that cramming, I can see why.