Teaching Kids to Make: Chemistry Around You- Batteries and Electricity

For Chemistry week we learned about electricity in Technology class. We started, very fundamentally, with electrons and electrical flow. All matter is made up of atoms and atoms are made out of smaller particles. These three main particles are protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons contain a positive charge, electrons contain a negative charge and neutrons are neutral. Sometimes an electron escapes its atom and "jumps" onto another. When electrons move from one atom to another it creates an electrical current.

Static Electricity experiments:

We talked about electricity sources and batteries. Then we discussed electrical circuits, conductors (materials that conduct electricity and complete a circuit) and insulators (materials that do not conduct electricity and will not complete a circuit).

Then we completed some simple circuits of our own with LEDs and coin cell batteries:

Some students found out they could create a switch using the conductive metal clips on their name tags:

We made potato batteries and lemon batteries.

We learned about switches and interrupting the electrical circuit.

As a side note, we sent Morse Code messages to each other.

We learned about electromagnetism- electric current produces a magnetic field, which forms circles around the electric current. And made homopolar motors using batteries, magnets and wire: