Electrical STEAM

I recently stumbled on a few interesting products while volunteering at a STEAM workshop for Art Unleashed. Art Unleashed is a non-profit organization that has been incorporating science and engineering into some of their more traditional art classes for kids. Earlier this year, they offered a Saturday workshop on electricity. The kids made greeting cards accented with LEDs that lit up. They drew simple circuits onto card-stock using bare conductive paint from Sparkfun. This water-based paint conducts electricity eliminating the need for wires between the LEDs and coin-cell batteries. The paint comes in little squeeze tubes, so it is very easy to apply; but the paint has to be applied fairly thickly and it takes a long time to dry, especially in humid weather. This activity would work better spread over a couple days, so the paint can dry overnight.

Next we had the kids create light-up animals with Playdoh and modeling clay. The Playdoh is conductive, while the clay acts as an insulator. This is an excellent way to demonstrate the difference between a series circuit and an electrical short, because the LED won't light up if you just stick it and the battery into a single lump of Playdoh. Normally, you wouldn't connect an LED directly to a 9-volt battery or it would immediately burn out; but since the Playdoh has such high resistance, you can create circuits without the need for adding traditional resistors. Just be sure to have extra LEDs on hand for those kids who accidentally burn out their LEDs. I tried this activity with the off-brand Dough from Dollar Tree (4 different colors for only $1) and it worked beautifully.

For fast finishers, we set up stations with Snap Circuits. Snap Circuits are electronic elements mounted on big squares of clear acrylic - kind of like electronic jigsaw puzzle pieces. Kids snap the various elements together to create electrical circuits. We used the Snap Circuits Jr kits, which contain instructions for creating 100 different circuits from over 30 elements, like switches, sensors, lights, sounds, motors, etc. I'd heard about Snap Circuits at conferences, but never had a chance to try them out. I was so impressed, I bought my own set from Amazon (less than $20) and tried it out with my 4-year old niece. She loved it, especially the flying propeller.