At Tech Will Save Us, a London-based EdTech company, I designed and developed a range of STEM kits aimed at making electronics and music accessible to children. The Electro Guitar Kit was one of the products I created: a cardboard electric guitar paired with a custom amplifier, built around a piezo pickup and speaker module.
The kit ships as a set of components — amplifier board, piezo pickup, strings, speaker, and laser-cut cardboard parts — that children assemble into a working electric guitar and amp. Step-by-step tutorials guide the build, which takes around fifteen to twenty minutes per piece, resulting in a surprisingly sturdy instrument. Printed frets on the neck and accompanying software let players learn finger placement, mix guitar sounds with voice recordings, and compose tracks with adjustable tempo and volume.
The challenge was to design electronics simple enough for an eight-year-old to assemble, yet capable of producing a sound worth playing with. Balancing the piezo sensitivity, amplifier gain, and speaker response within the constraints of a cardboard enclosure required careful iteration on both the circuit design and the physical form factor.
