Recommendations Please - A Good Compass Set For Technical Drawing:

[Morris]

I still have my slide rule though.

 

[RonA]

I used British Thornton back in the days when I started in the design drawing office:

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Temple are another good make:

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They might not be what your niece would choose, but as far as accuracy and reliability is concerned you can’t go far wrong.

Very little money for some quality kit.

Echo the comments about Thornton’s when I did my draughtsman training in the 70’s first thing the firm did was arrange for us to buy a complete set of Thornton’s drawing instruments. Still have mine & as good as the day I bought them.
Later, the firm decided to put all the project drawings on microfiche (we had a huge room purely dedicated to storing old drawings) & we switched to rotring pens (gave a more contrasting image than pencil) but had adaptors to allow the pens to be used in our Thornton compasses.
Retrained many years later to Autocad, thought the days of ink on paper had been consigned to the days of yore.
RonA

 

[Tangledfeet]

Not being funny, but are you sure that they still use pencil & paper to teach TD?

Still part of the curriculum and qualifications in Graphic Communication in Scotland, though a fraction of what it once was. Also, it helps reinforce understanding elsewhere.

 

[bricol]

I would think being taught on paper is the best way to uinderstand what view goes where and why.
CAD does so much automatically there is no need to think what line is solid, hidden, not needed etc.

Only problem with CAD is there's no draughtsman's licence anymore - you can't show things out of place, instead you need more views. Unless you do what a contract guy was doing at our place - adding extra features s a section line would show what the old 2D drawing section did - meaning the 3D CAD part was in-correct for any use in FEA, CAM, or much else really.