"Doing well" is 3.8% unemployment, and "doing badly" is 5.1% unemployment. That's the difference between taking a month to find a new job every two years and taking five weeks. It might even be a sign of reduced desperation for CS folks. Someone's making a mountain out of a molehill.

When I volunteer-taught middle schoolers electronics, we used 74-series small-scale-integrated circuit chips with breadboards and colored jumper wire from Radio Shack. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard The 7447 binary-7-segment decoder gives a lot of bang for the buck, but is tricky to hook up. The circuit we made was 4 bit ripple-carry binary adders, which we daisy chained together at the end of the term.