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Totem Motors

Kids and family play with motors and batteries to create a personal totem.

The totem is set alive when the kids used their fingers covered with a small round sticker of aluminum tape to close the circuit. (The participants switch on and off the circuit by putting their aluminum covered finger in the middle of open circuit module.)

Tips: suggest to the participants the inclusion of the open circuit module, as we noticed that kids were even more impressed by their own creation when they could making works with their finger.

Modules used: battery module, motor module, and open circuit module.

Connected with: short crocodile cables

Collective Circuits

Kids and family draw circuits on the floor using 3 stripes of aluminum tape. They then put the battery and LEDs modules on top of the aluminum stripes, at the corners of the drawing. The drawing light up!

Circuits add up on the floor, and can be reused or simply serve as traces of previous participants' activity.

Fun: One kid drew a simple car with the diodes being the back and front lights.

Challenges:

  • Inconsistent connections. Some participants had to press on the border of slightly bended modules to get a connection, when other modules worked fine by just dropping them on the floor.
  • Glue under the aluminum tape we used is not conductive. It makes drawing complex shapes a challenge, as trying to cut and paste a stripe on top of another will not work. I already ordered copper tape with conductive adhesive to test how it improve the creativity of participants' drawings.

Modules used: one battery module, two double leds module per circuits

Connected with: Aluminum adhesive tape

activities.txt ยท Last modified: 2014/10/18 00:56 by Julien Dorra