STEM Activities: Shortcut to circuits

Making electricity work for you with product kits.

Hi! I’m journalist Caroline Delbert and this is The Toolkit from Robotics & Beyond 501(c)3. Our goal every week is to give you some videos, projects, and products that help kids (and parents) get inspired by science, technology, engineering, math, and creative design. 

This week in issue 9 we’re going to talk about circuitry! Everything that plugs in or runs on batteries is full of circuitry, but what does that really mean? We’ll look at what a circuit is, how you can make them at home, and the surprising ways some kids’ tools are like what adults use when they build new hardware.

Closing Another “Loop” With Circuits

A few weeks ago, we talked about loops in coding, where instructions repeat in a certain way under certain conditions. An electronic circuit is a very similar idea. To have a working circuit, you need a power source and an overall shape of conductive wire that forms a loop. That’s why AA and AAA batteries have a + and – end, and the closed loop ensures the current can flow through the entire device worth of wiring and other guts.

We can see the consequences of incomplete circuits in nature in the form of lightning strikes. If lightning hits a nonconducting surface like a tall stone tower, the energy and heat that travels down as lightning is suddenly trapped in an insulating material where all it can do is deposit that extreme heat. This can turn sand into glass in an instant, for example. Lightning rods give lightning an attractive target and then channel the electric energy into the ground where it disperses without harming anything.

Let’s look at some cool ways to make circuits. These are mostly products, because you need special stuff to build circuitry, but there are plenty of videos of people using things like these and demonstrating electrical ideas, too. Thanks to Wirecutter for having an amazing curated list of electronics kits for “kids and beginners”! (Shoutout to myself as a teen, wiring a plug in class and then accidentally melting that plug into the classroom outlet.)

One reason circuitry is so important is that the same ideas that power our light switches scale down to how computers run. Hardware, including the latest, fastest microchips as well as cutting-edge quantum computing, runs by making the absolute best pathways for electrons to pass with as little resistance as possible. Physical links with electricity flowing through transmit all the information that becomes operating systems, smart refrigerators, and everything else.

Ages 5-8: Circuit Cubes (Product + 8 min video)

Circuit Cubes is the name for a family of toys that offer modular circuits in a standard shape and size that can be combined with Lego bricks, toy cars, and all kinds of other things. Wirecutter recommends the Whacky Wheels kit in particular because the Circuit Cubes come with a variety of other similar modular items that are all easy for even very young kids who can’t really read directions yet. Figuring this out together sounds very, very fun.

Ages 8-12: Chibitronics (Product + 5 min video)

Have you ever bought a greeting card that plays a song or has another special effect? These cards usually have a slightly thick feel because some circuitry stuff is concealed inside. Chibitronics makes self-adhesive copper tape and other items you can use to turn cards and notebooks into circuits. In the video above, YouTuber Melanie STEMdola shows how to tape off a circuit to switch a light on and off, including a really clever corner fold that acts as a switch because it touches two copper surfaces and completes the circuit.

Ages 12-15: Snap Circuits (Product + 4 min video)

Snap Circuits is another comprehensive line of electronic parts and kits for all ages, with complexity that scales as kids master new ideas. They have tons of ideas and projects online as well as guides in their kits. In the video above, an electronics expert from Project Lead the Way is using Snap Circuits to test an idea called a logic gate, which students often end up studying in college computer science courses. The way these circuits are constructed looks like a macro-scale version of the real printed circuit boards that eventually have transistors and chips and other components attached in order to power our devices.

(Last week’s most popular activity was: A giant working Gameboy in Minecraft)

With The Toolkit, we want to grow our readership as much as possible. If you could forward this newsletter on to any friends or family you think would like it, that would be great. The newsletter comes out every Tuesday; in the next few issues we’ll be experimenting with our content. Send us feedback at toolkitnewsletter@gmail.com.

Wow that’s cool!

There’s a programming game I love called Codemancer that’s available right now for free for PC, Mac, and smartphones. The game follows a young student at magic school where the “magic” is in the form of coding ideas like making lists of instructions and using loops (“repeats”). It’s really cute and edutaining — a steal at the $10 usual price, let alone for free. Here’s what it looks like: