[zsmi]

> What ever happened to exploring computing through just building small, cool, things?

It totally exists, but back in our day you built the one computer you had and that was that. Now everyone has lots of computers. So maybe you don't make your own laptop but you can absolutely make a "computer" and hack all kinds of fun things.

See: Arduino, Raspberry PI, STM32 et al., Teensy, BeagleBone, TinyFPGA, etc. etc. etc.

Honestly, I am kinda jealous. You can buy more random electronics than I could've dreamed of as a kid with paper route money (do kids even still do that?). Test equipment too.