Learn How To Make Simple Electric Circuits At Home

 

Here are some easy STEM activities for elementary-aged kids. You don’t need to be a genius nor spend a fortune to help your child learn how to make electric circuits! The parts for all these activities can be purchased for about $10, mostly for wire, LEDs, paper fasteners and coin batteries. You and your children will also learn how to make a switch from ordinary paper fasteners, and how to incorporate it into a switch-controlled circuit. Using a little bit of wire, a coin battery, two paper fasteners, cardstock and two LEDs, you and your child can create an Electric Puppet, whose eyes light up when you close the mouth.

You’ll begin by exploring how to light up red, yellow, blue and green LEDs the size of jellybeans. How can you turn them on using a coin battery? How many can you turn on at one time? Which colors can you turn on together? After you have made and LED circuit, you’ll explore switches. Where can you find them in your home, what do they control, and what do you have to do to operate them? The most common switches come in four kinds. These are the pushbutton, the rotary, slide and toggle switches. For example, A keyboard consists of pushbutton switches, desk fans and electric stoves are turned on and off by rotary switches, many toys use slide switches and a light switch is a toggle switch.  You don’t have to buy these – you can make each kind from office supplies!

Once you have an LED circuit and a switch, the next step is to add the switch to a circuit, so the switch controls the circuit. This step involves breaking the circuit at some point and inserting the switch. Once you make a switch-controlled circuit, you can build on this idea by making and using hidden switches. These are even more common than the switches you can see. Some examples are the switches inside light-up sneakers, Tickle-me Elmo, voice- or motion-activated lights, as well as those that control refrigerator lights, automatic doors, car alarms and dome lights in cars. With a little extra work, you can create hidden switches, such as the one inside the mouth of the Electric Puppet. Closing the mouth activates this switch and turns on the lights that form the eyes.

 


 

 

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