You're right, it actually may be more fun and interesting to provide you with all of the tools, and instructions on how to use those plus various common household substances to produce the chemicals that you need. Perhaps along with a few samples that are either impossible, difficult, or dangerous to produce yourself, but are useful for various reactions (since I haven't touched chemistry since junior year in high school, I don't necessarily know which those would be).

How much of that is realistic for including in a set designed for beginners who have zero to little formal chemistry experience though and have a budget in line with that.

I see you're getting my point that sets designed for beginners are not teaching chemistry.

Its like giving a kid who wants to be a chef an easy bake oven and some prepak mixes. It technically involves cooking, so ...

Or giving a kid who wants to learn about computers an ipod. It does have a CPU inside, doesn't it?

I basically listed what I remember of my lab drawer contents from undergrad quant class. I could see having a lot of fun with less stuff.

Another aspect of hacking / startup / makerspace type activities is making a moderately crude instrument. For example a spectrophotometer with bad but usable specs could probably be made as an arduino shield using a light tight box, an incandescent bulb, a log converter feeding the A/D of the arduino, and a glass prism sitting on a servo controlled by the arduino. And some software.

Or instead of burrets, a digital model using a syringe (no needle needed) and a screw and nut hooked up to a stepper motor driven by arduino. So given a syringe of 1M vinegar or whatever you can squirt out any precision volume.

A PH meter shield for an arduino sounds too simple and obvious to even mention. There are more elaborate potentiometer systems where you measure the voltage required to shove a certain current thru a solution and so forth, stuff I don't remember as well.

As far as budget goes, I don't think you can do "real" chemistry without at least a decent scale and some kind of volumetric measurement tool (a grad cylinder if nothing else? A set of volumetric flasks?)

If you insist on "chemistry without numbers" you may as well just mix different colors of kool aide powder for all you'll learn.

But the idea isn't to teach kids chemistry - it's to get the kids interested in chemistry.

I was given something very similar to this as a kid: http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-MX-907-200-Electronic-Project/d... (in fact, I think it was that, 20 years ago!)

It didn't teach me anything about electronics, I was too young to really grasp what I was doing. It taught me that with sufficient knowledge you can make something out of individually useless bits of electronics.

You're right to be more demanding of your undergrad quant class but this might be just the thing to get your 8 year old niece/nephew interested in science.

And now we've closed the loop on the original debate that kids can't have dangerous chemicals, if they're not going to learn the difference anyway, may as well use perfume instead of carbon tet and koolade powder instead of chromium compounds.

That isn't how it works.

The Kosmos chemistry kits in the late 1960's were awesome. Shoot, I had a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.