I built one, and my 12 year-old godson built the other (only his second project!) Both work great.

Since my godson tends to spend more time with the iron on the board, I decided to use a DIP socket so he wouldn't fry the microcontroller. It's not expensive: you can find them at most radio shack stores, but you can also get it from most other electronics suppliers.

It also allows you to swap in other chips with variants of the software, or just replace it if it gets damaged. Leaning to remove chips from these sockets without damage can be tricky, but is possible. If you really want to swap chips frequently, you might consider the ZIF sockets that EMS sells.

-- Mitch

A regular socket is a fine idea.

There isn't "officially" room for a ZIF socket, but we do actually use one on that board to program and test the chips-- to do so, we had to mount two of the resistors on the other side. If you're programming more than a few chips it's worth the hassle, though.