Can kids still get chemistry sets and erector sets? I had a chemistry set called "the magic of chemistry", I had endless hours of fun changing the colors of solutions and such.
Scruffy says: ===> math! Lots of times cool visualizations can create curiosity. AI is good for that. For instance - the video game "Asteroids" can help develop an excellent intuition for differential geometry. Origami, spirographs, fractal generators...
The scientific side of visualization is a lot of computer graphics. For instance, here's a diagram (side view) of the human brain showing a few connections, and here's a picture of a real brain showing the same thing, and they look very darn similar. How did they make this diagram? Well, they sliced up a brain, digitized each slice into the computer, had the computer rebuild the brain from the slices, and then rotated the result by 90 degrees to get the side view.
So along the way you learn about homogeneous coordinates which is worth a 20 year career at Disney or the gaming company of your choice.
