General
- Doing all of the activities in their entirety will likely take more than 1 hour. Use your judgment to determine which activities to spend more time on, and which activities to shorten or skip.
- Leave time for students to explore and experiment during the activities.
- When doing the group activities, smaller groups (3-4 people) work best.
Circuit Simulation
- Check for food allergies before the activity
- If there are students with food allergies, recruit them to help with the activity (by being the switch, for example) instead of being an electron in the circuit
- Make plenty of space in the classroom for the human circuit -- more is better!
Lemon Battery
- Before doing the demonstration, it can be useful to use a voltmeter to test that the circuit is connected properly.
- It will generally take 3 lemons connected in series to power an LED.
- It is normal for the lemon battery to only work in short bursts.
Graphite Resistor Lightbulb
- Instruct students to never short-circuit the LED by touching the LED directly to the battery terminal.
- Allow time for students to experiment with the circuit (some simple changes are using a different material as the resistor, changing the distance between the LED and the wire contact along the graphite resistor.
MaKey MaKey Circuits
- Have some simple programs and games ready (e.g. one-button games such as Canabalt) to test the created keys with.
- This is an interesting lead-in to further discussions on computer programming. Some students may already have some experience with programming, and if a program written in a simple programming language such as Scratch, Python, or Racket are used, then it is possible for students to understand a little more about what's going on behind the scenes in terms of what the computer itself is trying to process.