Our Mission
Our mission is to provide quality, innovative toys and educational products that are fun, affordable, engaging, and designed to instill a passion for learning and creating.
We’re committed to inspiring imagination, invention, and exploration.
We believe the best way to learn is by doing.
Our Story
We didn’t start out in the toy business, but we’ve always been in education. In fact, our first products were convergence generators built by engineers for television repairmen, and our first customer was an education provider. While our focus today is to bring fun into learning about electronics, one thing hasn’t changed: We still love engineering. We believe engaging minds in the excitement of building a real electronic device or a real working machine —no matter how simple—will never go out of style.
We still produce quality electronic instruments and test equipment, and we remain dedicated to creating affordable, safe and easy to use, educational toys that allow kids of all ages to use both sides of their brains and above all else, to Learn by doing®.
Our Founder
Our Founder, Ermenegildo “Gil” Cecchin, was born during the Great Depression, a few weeks after his parents arrived in America. He was the oldest child of a poor Italian immigrant family in Chicago, and his father’s job was digging tunnels for the Chicago sewer system. Gil’s first language was Italian. When he started school at 8 years old, his teachers spoke only English — not Italian. Gil had to learn English himself, with the help of a buddy from the neighborhood. One of Gil’s first jobs was painting the stenciled white logo onto the red Radio Flyer toy wagons at the Radio Steel company in Chicago.
When Gil was only 17, his father passed away suddenly. To support his mother and younger siblings, he took a job at Motorola as a technician in the Product Engineering Department, where Gil learned electronics and engineering hands-on. By the 1960s, he was Senior Project Engineer, leading a team of electrical engineers at Motorola’s Advanced Development Laboratory. At Motorola, Gil revolutionized the electronics industry by making color-TV readily available and affordable for consumer television sets all over the world. Gil was honored with the Product Engineering Master Design Award for an All-Transistor TV Receiver, and the Exceptional Innovation Engineer Award. During his 26 years at Motorola, Gil was the sole inventor or co-inventor for nearly 25 patents related to his work on developing color television and integrated circuits.
Gil was almost completely deaf in one ear and suffered from Type 1 Diabetes most of his life, but he never let it get in the way of his passion. He loved tinkering with electronics and designing circuits and he spent hours in his basement testing new designs or sketching out circuits. Unfortunately, Gil passed away in 2002 and never got to see how SNAP CIRCUITS® became a cornerstone in the STEM movement worldwide.
still under construction circa 1986.
Elenco—The Early Days
In 1972, Gil started Elenco in the basement of his home in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Illinois, after developing a color bar generator for TV repairmen. The company name was derived from the first two letters of the words Electronic Engineering Company. Elenco’s first customer was an educational institution that provided electronics correspondence courses by mail – sort of like the 1970s version of online learning.
Elenco grew in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s by supplying technical schools, colleges, and high schools across the country with educational kits and products that taught the basics of electronics and engineering. Elenco was STEM before the term “STEM” even existed. Gil wanted to share his passion for electronics and engineering and he felt the best way to learn was by doing. Thus, Elenco’s trademark — Learn by doing was born.
By the 1990’s, Elenco was creating educational toys, like the Electronic Playground, which is still sold today. In the late 1990s, Gil was absolutely thrilled to begin developing SNAP CIRCUITS®, along with his two sons, Jim and Jerry, who worked hard to make SNAP CIRCUITS® what it is today!
Elenco Today
Family owned and operated since 1972, Elenco is located in the Chicago suburb of Wheeling, Illinois. We are proud to call ourselves the makers of the award-winning SNAP CIRCUITS® brand.
For 20 years, SNAP CIRCUITS® has been the go-to toy for teaching electronics, engineering and more. SNAP CIRCUITS® are endorsed by K-12 educators globally and used in schools, libraries, museums, after-school and homeschool programs, STEM and Maker programs, and at home.
Many of today’s rising leaders in science and technology learned the basics of engineering by creating and inventing with SNAP CIRCUITS® as a child.
