You Might Be A Geeky Dad If: Your Kids Practice Spelling In Morse Code

Kids learn better if they’re engaged in the topic at hand. [Todd] found something that has his son just begging to practice his spelling words each night. He converts them all to Morse code and taps each out on the Morse code practice station they built together. To start off Todd connected the keyer to his Fluke 87 meter, using the continuity tester to sound a beep each time the key is depressed. But this is just a temporary setup until [Todd] could help guide his young one through some circuit design and assembly.

The replacement is based on a 555 timer. They grabbed an electronics project book and found the schematic along with a Morse code primer. With parts in hand [Todd] films as his son hones his soldering skills with each connection. The finished project uses the timer chip to produce the audio frequency heard from the on-board speaker. If you’ve never had the joy of teaching a kid how to solder, you’re going to love seeing the video.

11 thoughts on “You Might Be A Geeky Dad If: Your Kids Practice Spelling In Morse Code

    1. In most countries you know at-least long-division and two languages before ten..

      He IS learning morse code though.. sequenced pulses for letters is probably complex for some..

      1. The idea is simple enough. Learning it well enough so that you can use it in realtime – not so much. To me, doing it by hand seems so… backwards. It’s something you’d think would be perfect for computers to be programmed to handle.

  1. Its nice to see parents sharing their hobbies with their kids. He could be wasting his time playing video games. Instead he is having fun with dad, learning spelling, morse code, and electronics all at the same time.

  2. When learning code, you *never* want to look at dots and dashes. You only want to look at letters and correlate them to audible “dits” and “dahs”.

    The *proper* way to do this is to install come code-to-text software on your computer, and then key up the spelling words. You then check your spelling and keying by looking at what text appears on the screen.

  3. Love see that as the young man moved along the soldering became natural for him. Hopefully he goes to find electronics projects that are fun for him to use, after he builds them. Really doesn’t read like learning morse cod was/is a goal. Going about it like this a person may pick up the code but learning it aurally seems to be the best method. Having a shortwave receiver to copy amateur radio operators using morse helps, soon one finds themselves actually eavesdropping in on conversations

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