Got the Electronic Brick
The Electronic Brick Kit
Recently at the Maker Shed I found the ‘Electronic Brick‘ starter kit for Arduino.
The Electronic Brick kit is made by Seeed Studio, (yes, that’s three e’s) you can find it on their homepage here as well. Online docs (pdf) are available for it. In addition to the components in the kit, they sell many others that plug into it.
In a nutshell, it provides a shield for the Arduino, and a bunch of modular plug+play components allowing you to easily prototype simple electronics. The docs show how to integrate these components with Arduino’s programming language. Which is based on Wiring (implemented in C/C++), which in turn is very similar to Processing (Java).
I’d been looking for something like this for some time: I’ve been wanting to make some more interesting things with my Arduino, but trying to by hand solder all the required components takes more time and know-how than I want to currently invest. Plug+play = good. And a nice project over the Christmas break 
The Arduino!