Here's a clock I build when I was about Ahmed's age, it's what hobbyists do:
....
I'm gutted that I don't have the clock (or even pictures of it)
of my own design back in the 70s, from about 20 TTL chips when I was 12.
It consisted of some 7490s, 7492s, and 7447s, with a bunch of glue logic to convert the hour 7492 output to BCD. None of your LS nonsense either, this was full fat TTL, I don't think LS was even around then.
Even back then, I pushed back against tying counter outputs to reset pins to fudge a given arbitrary divide ratio (quite a common practice), because if you take the timing specs from the datasheet, the result is not guaranteed, although in practice I accept that it works.
Crystals were expensive, and so would be the divider chain, so I used the mains 50Hz. At the time I didn't realise that this technique is used quite often for clocks, as mains 50Hz, at least in the UK, is fairly stringently managed, and although it may vary slightly throughout the day, the aggregate frequency is 50Hz. I set up a resistor/zener limiter, fed into a 7413 Schmitt trigger in an attempt to use the hysteresis to work through any spikes. It didn't work that well, when the washing machine changed cycles, it would jump forward many seconds! It wasn't until several years later when I started to understand analogue electronics that I would understand concepts of filtering sufficiently to be able to correct for that.
Current draw was about an amp, I used an LM309K screwed to a bit of metal, it got pretty hot.
It was hand wired built on stripboard. No oscilloscope, just a crappy 1k ohm per volt multimeter and an LED plus resistor.
Looking back, I'd say that designing the logic, particularly the 7492 to BCD part, hand wiring 20 TTL chips, and getting it to work was quite an achievement for a 12 year old. IF I saw a kid of that age doing something as complex as that nowadays I'd be pretty blown away.