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Recent decades have seen techniques being rapidly developed for trapping individual atoms, bringing low system entropy and excellent control of the couplings from the environment, making these atoms ideal building blocks to assemble quantum systems from the bottom-up. This is especially useful for the study of quantum mechanics and quantum engineering. In this talk, I will describe two experiment platforms – trapped atomic ions with electric potential and trapped neutral atoms with optical tweezers, and along the line I will focus on three experiments that shows that both platforms have demonstrated these capabilities. For trapped ions, I will describe a recent demonstration of high fidelity two-qubit quantum logic gate with two ⁹Be⁺ ions, and a dissipative production of a maximally entangled state with a ⁹Be⁺-²⁴Mg⁺-²⁴Mg⁺-⁹Be⁺ ion chain. For neutral atoms, I will describe a recent experiment that forms an atomic 50:50 beam splitter by careful control of trapping potentials, and based on this creating spin entanglement between two ⁸⁷Rb atoms with postselection. At the end I will describe a proposal to further develop these platforms, towards making them reliable and practical devices for quantum manipulation.