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Week 9: Electricity & Electrical Circuits

You can’t see electricity (usually), but you can certainly detect its effects. Blenders, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, airplanes – all of these use electricity.  While you don’t need to understand electricity to turn on a light, you do need to cover the basics in order to make the burglar alarms, latching switches, relays, and more.  I’ll show you how to convert your kitchen table into a real Electricity Lab.  Be sure to download the experiment list for this month, as there are so many to choose from!

  • 11/04: Week 9 Electricity & Circuits (Series & Parallel, Burglar Alarms) Unit 10 (Download Worksheet #9)
Download Shopping & Experiment List for November

Week 10: Simple Robotics (Electrical Components, Sensors & Robots)

Now it's time to roll those electrical circuits into something that moves, wiggles, dances, crawls, swims, hops, and explores their environment!  Let's take your motors, LEDs, switches, buzzers, wires, and more and make them into homemade robots you design yourself!

Week 11: Magnetism (Linear Accelerators)

What IS magnetism, anyway? You can feel how two magnets can push against each other when you bring them close together, but what IS that invisible force, and why is it there? And how come magnets stick to the fridge and not a soda can, even though both are metal? And if you’ve ever slid magnets down a metal ramp, you’ve seen them defy gravity and slow to a stop. And how come the grapes from your lunchbox twist around to align with magnets, even though there’s no iron inside? Does it sound like fun to figure this stuff out? That’s exactly what we’re going to do together this week!

Week 12: Electromagnetism (Buzzers, Relays)

This is one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time: moving magnets create electricity. Before this, people thought of electricity and magnetism as two separate things. When scientists realized that not only were they linked together, but that one causes the other, then the physics really started to fly! In this lesson, we’re going to take a closer look at how magnets create electricity by building electromagnets, galvanometers, motors, relays, telegraphs, and speakers. 

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