Teaching Kids to Make: Maker Camp- Circuits

Building upon our electricity lessons, we started learning about circuits. We talked about simple circuits consisting of an LED and battery; then an LED, battery and switch. We reverse engineered an animatronic dilophosaurus at Science City and talked about motors, sounds, sensors, etc. After that we built circuits with LittleBits electrical component blocks.

Talking Puppet:

Battery. Roller Switch. Buzzer.

When the alligator's mouth is closed the switch turns the buzzer off, when it opens the switch is off and the buzzer allows the alligator to "Roar!"

Walking Panda:

Power. Pulse. LED. Dimmer. Wire. Vibration Motor.

Students learned about pulses and dimmers and their effects. When the motor is turned on, pulsed and attached to the panda's leg he "walks" across the table.

Automatic Bubble Blower:

Power. Dimmer. Fan.

Turn the fan on and create gigantic bubbles without wasting your breath!

Drum Light:

Power. Pressure Sensor. Wire. LED.

Add a paper cup to the mix, drum on it so that it presses against the pressure sensor and lights the LED. We also added in the buzzer later on. We talked about sensors of all kinds and their various uses.

The students built their own robots of whatever design they chose. After they constructed them the students were tasked with drawing out diagrams of how their robots would function, adding sensors and motors, etc. when appropriate:

Then we looked at some real circuits wired up on breadboards using sound, lights and potentiometers.

(no photos, sorry)

Lastly we looked at soft circuits with some soft sculptures and garments which have electrical elements from simple LEDs and batteries to EL Wire and LilyPad microcontrollers. (Add links to 3giraffes). The kids made their own soft circuit dinosaurs:

The dinos were pre-cut out with a pocket flap glued on. The LED eye was also glued into place.

The students stitched (with conductive thread) from the eye to one side of the pocket flap then from the other side of the eye to underneath the pocket flap. They tested the connection, decorated and the remaining two sides of the pocket were glued down.