After years of planning, months of basic electronics and programming exercises he’s finally completed a project by himself with little help (but with a ton of pestering) from me. He came up with the idea during one of our idea sessions where he needs to write down and draw how his idea would work. This won over the “scale that talks to you” idea. We then built a electronics only prototype, which was not easy to be honest. I didn’t realize how complicated a dead man switch is without software. After that we moved over to the software coding which we initially used a sketch like drag and drop implementation. He was not happy with that version because he wanted it to “scream” and not just play music. That functionality was not available on the drag drop UI of Make Code. So we switched over to writing it in python. I was actually amazed at how easy it was for him to pick up the language and be able to see the correlations between the visual code blocks we used to how it was written in actual code. One example was the “while True:” statement to which he said “that’s just like the Forever block!”. Although to be honest, we’ve spent months working in make code arcade that I would be next to disappointed if he didn’t see that one coming 
.He also put in the effort of making a short video explainer of the entire project. I wish I get paid soon for being his personal camera man. He did edit the videos himself using lightworks. I’ve been asking him to edit his own music videos lately so that he gains a better appreciation of what I’ve been doing for him! 
I have been compiling a list of things I am personally grateful for during these last 4 months of the covid-19 lockdown. Having this opportunity to work with him on electronics/coding projects more often is definitely on top of that list. I hope he can someday in the future look back and remember the great lockdown of 2020 not as a scary time in his childhood but one where he had a blast staying at home, building impractical projects with his geeky dad 
Technical Insanities of a Mad Computer Scientist 