Reddit reviews Elenco 140 Piece Pre-formed Jumper Wire Kit

Not a dumb question at all. Yes you can, but you need to be very careful. Careful to the point that while you can, you shouldn't. Electrostatic discharge (ESD) damage to things can be very frustrating to debug. The on a cool dry day you will pull some big sparks. Here are some other very common ways people destroy their Arduinos when getting started.

• Driving an LED without current limiting resistors
  
  
• Driving an LED with current limiting resistor right off a pin and drawing too much current from the pin. You'll see a lot of arduino tutorials powering LEDs right off a pin. You can do this, but it is not best practice. A discussion on not drawing too much current from arduino pins
  
  
• Shorting pins to ground. If V = 5v and the resistance between your pin and ground is roughly zero what current draw do you get from V=IR?
  
  
• Powering a servo from the 5v generated on the arduino. This won't necessarily damage your arduino. What it will likely do, esp if you are moving more than one, is cause a "brown out" on your 5v supply causing your microcontroller to reset.
  
  
• A circuit isn't a circuit without a closed loop. That means check your grounds if you get weird behavior.
  
  
• Every single time after you assemble a circuit, but before you power it for the first time use your multimeter to make sure nothing is connected to either power or ground that shouldn't be. A couple extra minutes there can save hours of headaches and $$$ in destroyed parts (don't ask me how I know this). "The magic smoke can only be installed at the factory."
  
  
• Don't share holes in your breadbord. That ruins it. If you are going to use a breadboard to hold things in place while you solder have one dedicated to that task alone.
  
  
• Stranded jumper wires are your enemy. Take the ones that came with your kit and throw them away. What you want is solid 22 AWG wires. I have had many a problem caused by poor connections or including the strands introducing stray inductance and capacitance to make tricky circuits like demodulation circuits not work. When I was in university taking the AM/FM/PM class the wires and breadboards were a joke. The breadboards were so used and abused they barely made contacts with the wire. Most of the wire was that stranded garbage. I like to not F around and waste time so I bought my own breadboard and each lab I would round up enough solid jumper wire to get the job done. It would take me 15 - 30 minutes to complete the labs while the other students, many of whom scoffed at my breadboard and solid wire method, would be there the whole session and sometimes longer for no reason other than the poor jumper wires and messed up breadboards. Use wires like this or make your own with something like this
  
  
  
  Don't forget to check out /r/arduino