[schreiaj]

Man, I must have interacted with weird middle schoolers at my local hackerspace... Seemed like every last one of them had either some simple arduino project or something with a RasPi they were working on. I'd hate to live in a place where most people have no idea what a circuit board looks like.

Also, asking doesn't need to get the police involved: "Hey, what is this?" "Oh it's a clock I built" 'Why'd you bring it to school?" "Cuz I'm proud of it and wanted to show you"

If there was still doubt, ok, find someone who knows something about it (there's gotta be a tinkerer SOMEWHERE in the school district) and ask them to take a look. Maybe couch it as "Why don't we show it to X, I think they'd get a kick out of it?"

But arresting a 14 yr old tinkerer for a clock? Whatever happened to having sane reasonable conversations?