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Circuits are made up of a loop of wire that connects the negative and positive terminals of a power source like a battery
A circuit may also contain a number of components such as bulbs, switches, motors or any number of different things.
They key bit is it must be a complete loop that contains a power source.
Try building a simple circuit like this and fitting an ammeter to read the current in the circuit.
The meters are on the right handside of the simulator. I have placed a bulb in my circuit too (notice that the wires go in one side and out of a different side)
My Ammeter says that there are 0.90A flowing in my circuit
In school our ammeters look similar to the simulator. Our meters in school can work as both ammeters (read current) and voltmeters (read voltage).
You just have to set them up slightly differently. This is how you make it an ammeter. It must always be in line with the circuit like in the simulator diagram above.
To read the voltage in school we place our wire like shown here. We also have to wire a voltmeter into our circuits differently. We do this because an ammeter reads the current flowing through it so must be in the circuit whereas a voltmeter reads the difference in energy across a component or part of the circuit.
See the diagram below
Here you can see the voltage across the light bulb reads 9.00V.
We would often describe the voltmeter as being set up in parallel, whereas the ammeter is described as being in series because it is in line in the loop.
As you can see in this circuit the bulb is very bright at 9.00V. If this voltage was lower it would be dimmer since it would be emitting less energy across the bulb.
There are two main types of circuits that you can build. Series and Parallel circuits. Click on the links below for more
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