The children got a drawing of the assembled stripeboard as reference.

They were encouraged to start with the heat resistant parts of small height -> the wire bridges
After those they got the hang of the soldering.
And were ready to go on with the resistors.

The 2x4 ESP holder required the four conducting paths to be separated with e.g. a boxcutter.
This was ideally done by their parents, but never by themselves.

Before they kept going  with the LEDs, the transistor or the capacitors, they were told about the polarization of these parts, and how they could tell the difference between the legs.

They furthermore got the hint to bend their LEDs in a 90° angle, in order to have them shine towards the front of the device, just like a real TV-remote would.

Even though one could attach it earlier, we tried to wait with the button until now, as the pressure point of it kept irritating the children.

Afterwords we turned over the board once and soldered the voltage regulator to the back, as the part is a smd.

Lastly we flipped the board a second time and attached the pretty ramshackle micro usb connector.