I agree with everything you said, but honestly I was pretty impressed by the clock. Not sure if you were trying to be disparaging or if that's entirely my interpretation, but he seems to be a talented kid.
Well, I look at it and I go "yep, that's a busted clock." You can see the factory transformer, the factory display, the factory circuit board. An Evil Mad Science kit it's not. The passion project of a 14 year old, not so much. The story I grabbed the quotes from quotes the kid as spending 20 minutes on it. If I were him, I'd wanna be busted for something he'd actually spent some time on. I built a geiger counter in freshman electronics class (took about a week) and I have no doubts that given more than 20 minutes, this kid or any of his classmates could do similar. But the thing they busted him for is literally a gutted alarm clock.