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Electronics Projects for 12-Year-Olds?
nepheles asks: "I've recently been asked to teach some electronics classes for a group of 12-year-olds. They're all new to it. Electronics always seemed boring in school, so for them, I've been looking at hands-on projects: I've considered making basic motors, steady-hand games, and Morse-code communication systems. What experiments have you seen in electronics that amazed you, and that could be recreated in the classroom? What cool things have you made that would be simple enough for a kid to do? At a meta level, how would you like to have been taught electronics?"
You can have him build a Cyclotron
(Score:0, Interesting)
Tazer Tag
magnetic nailgun using light sensors to turn on/off electromagnets (did this one as a kid, put the nail through a board)
A light sensor based levitation, again, similar idea.
The idea is to make something cool in the end without having to know a whole lot upfront.
Super easy to build. We made a bunch of boards for some elementary school kids and had them solder on the components and play with the thing in general. We were kind of time limited to a few hours, but it was a good experience.
Ramsey siren kits are always well-received.
http://www.ramseyelectronics.com
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
go for the basics, such as steady hand games. all you need is a battery, a light a buzzer and wire.
Go into electronic stores, they can have lots of simple kits that would be apropriate.
You could get some magazines for idea's, i occasionally look at them, and every once in a while there are some good basic projects for children.
remember the radio shack 25, 50, 100, 150 in 1 experiment kits?
what about something like that, where a "generic" box of parts can be reused for several experiments? you would end up getting a bit more mileage out of your materials, cheaper on costs, and it would tend to keep the experiments simpler yet still pretty neat.
off topic, i just got a survey popup as i was submitting this. slashdot venturing out?
Anything that involves sensing from a distance or catching people will excite kids. A cigar box "safe" for hiding your diary that will buzz when you open it unless you know to flip some toggle switches on the outside to a certain position will fascinate them.
Also, any simple animatronics -- a santa clause that waves when you get close, or a garbage can that has the lid open and a hand slides out -- will also catch them.
making a Tesla Coil?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
If you show them anything with AC or that has any cyclic voltage variation, show it to them on an oscilloscope.... It's much easier to a 12yo if they can visualise what is going on.
However basic electronics is the stuff that 12yo kids get - show them the foundations...
The wire-wound rheostat.
The two-pencil carbon arc.
Heating nichrome wire to make a poor filament.
Build a battery in a beaker.
Hand-wind a motor and build it on plywood with
wire.
Electromagnet locking to a piece of metal.
Morse key, with a solenoid recording the results.
You want to show them something so that the building block *stays* in their mind....
If the idea is simple enough, it stays with them forever.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
was making custom rockets, my tech teacher supervised us, and let us make it out of any thing we wished, I made mine out of pbc pipe and used a I based motor, and I even made my nose cone out of wood using a lathe. Also we hand etched circuit boards and made cool little curcuits, and soidered on our own parts. Taught me alot about electronics and how things worked. Start with the basics (what a resister is and how compasitors work).
keanmarine.com
A persistance of vision toy, which is a simple microcontroller that blinks 8 LEDs on and off so that when waved through the air, an image or message appears to float in front of the viewer can be made in bulk for really cheap.
As technology changes, we start off learning about it at a higher level. Nobody learns to use electron tubes these days, though they are used in some applications.
Take a similar approach. Provide some basic understanding of the transistor, but don't make a circuit that simply blinks. Instead set them up about 10 years behind the curve rather than 20: throw together a small microcontroller board and a breadboard with some components. Maybe just give them a bare microcontroller to insert into the board.
Start with a few basic circuits, light an LED, amplify a light or sound source, make a touch sensor. Then get them to write a small program for the microcontroller, to blink a light. After that, try something a little more interactive like a who-pressed-the-button-first game.
A mess of transistors and wires isn't inspiring, and most of the kids won't have any idea how to come up with useful circuits on their own. But when they realize how much they can do with a microcontroller, watch their eyes light up. Well, maybe some of the geekier ones will. But use the microcontroller as the core, and introduce analog concepts as they relate, for example doing R/C calculations for a smooth PWM signal.
A single programmable component can often replace or exceed the function of dozens of discrete components. That's where things are heading these days, though analog designers are still needed. I just think you should introduce some technology of our generation so they won't blow off electronics as a lot of work to get a result a thousand times less exciting than what their cell phone can do.
There is a guy on /. who peddles those things in his sig. Looked pretty cool for a kid's project. Cheap too - I think it was around $12.
Hold a Robot Sumo competition. Solarbotics Sumovores are all-electronic rather than microprocessor-driven. $90. For the same price, the microprocessor-driven Junun Mark III is a good bet. Both kits require complete assembly. Students get to learn soldering.
There are all kinds of things you can make from a disposable camera flash. You can make a strobe light by using a diac, neon lamps, or a triac and an external circuit connected across the shutter contacts (use a D cell instead of the AA so it charges faster) or make a paper clip shooter by connecting a coil in series with the flash lamp. Wrap the coil around a tube of some sort and put a paper clip just behind the coil. To fire it you will also need a *WELL INSULATED* push button wired to the shutter contacts. When the button is pushed, the flash lamp will begin to conduct and allow current to flow through the coil. I saw a similar device in an electronics class that was made from six disposable camera flash units wired in parallel, and connected to a flat coil on top of a clear box. There was a metal ring and a ping-pong ball on top of the coil, and when the cameras were discharged through the coil it was able to shoot the ping-pong ball about 50 feet vertically. (It used an SCR instead of the flash lamp as the switch.) Also you can get the cameras for free from some photo developing places and they only need 1 "AA" battery to work. The only problem is obviously the high voltage - if you are going to have 12 year olds messing with these things you need to make sure the cameras are insulated well before you let anyone turn on the power, and that they are discharged before anyone starts wiring anything up.
Have them make LED flashlights. It's a good oppertunity to introduce basic circuits, along with ohm's law. And if yoiu really want to get into it, you could do pot work for variable intensity.
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
As a code geek in school, I would have liked to see some simple interfacing projects. Say, make a logic analyzer out of a parallel port, or drive a LED 7-segment display.
I always thought yet another crystal radio, or running a motor or light bulb was kind of boring. Didn't hold my attention.
Also you might consider demonstrating how to hack off-the-shelf hardware... take things apart, how to tell what different components are and what they do, how to determine how a chip is mapped into memory, connect to a memory bus (think Mailstation, etc) to add new components...
Connect tools, scopes, analyzers, etc. to show what is happening in the circuit. Measure voltages and show how they match up with the specification for the part...
Come on! Jacobs ladders and tesla coils.. What more do you need? All awe inspiring and fun as hell.
This isn't exactly electronics, but it's fun (and yes, it is my site and yes, it looks like crap, but it was my first web site and I keep it that way for nostalgic reasons :-)
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~palmer/motor.html
For "real" electronics, if you just want to make a easy and fun project, most kids are usually impressed by things that blink LEDs (like a scanner sequencer type circuit) or make noise (I would suggest sirens).
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Make loud noises
Give off heat or flames
Give of bright light
move on it's own
be capable of irritating your friends at lunch
So, overloading exploding LED capacitors are the answer!
so yeah, making your own motors would work, building a race car with a pair of small motors and a headlight with a wired remote to start/stop, homebuilt radio, a small generator to light a lightbulb, etc.
Lastly, be sure it's durable, cause they will be dropped and abused a lot on the way home to show mom and dad.
SAILING MISHAP
when I was in like 9th grade, I had a project that used dry ice, unfortunately the project didn't work, but everyone loved the dry ice.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
but Radio Shack's electronic project kits were the key for me. When my dad showed me how to light a light bulb with a battery i immediately had him take me to radio shack and get me one.
... then, when i was about 10, i was working on my project kits and suddenly it hit me... "dude there are girls out there. go get one!" so I went outside, hopped on my bike, rode down the *sidewalk*, and was smashed by a car coming out of the alley at 35mph. i was thrown right into the street, skipping the part of the alley between the sidewalk and the street, some 20 feet away. no broken bones but a concussion and a broken eardrum.
...
I spent the next 4 years doing nothing but tinkering with my project kits. I made radios, motion detectors, calculators, wind generators... i wound up fixing TVs and walkman radios, and game consoles for friends.
i kept off the electronic project kits but i never did get a girlfriend until i was 18.
my lesson to you - stay away from electronics, and keep the kids away too. I mean it.
this is a true story, by the way. all too true. I still can't hear things like digital watches out of my left ear
Bizarre Labs has some great stuff. Lemon batteries, crystal radios, electro-magnets, leyden jars. Even plans for Tesla coils and radioactive cloud chambers are there.
This does beg the question: What are the basic principles that need to be covered. Here are some that I would imagine are important:
Magnetism
Electromagnetism
Basic Circuits and electron flow
Photon Simultaneity
... well maybe not that last one, success rates are still pretty low. You might have to build up to that with a few simple explanatory topics.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
I'm a third year Electronics Systems Engineering student.
A nice, simple, and (if they dig hardcore math) easy circuit with a blinking light is an series RC circuit, with a light (also in series). Basically, it will flash on and off, at a rate dependant on the time constant of the circuit (=R*C). No need for soldering, and who doesn't like flashing things?
As someone who had precisely one lesson in school to do with electronics (7th grade generic-science class), I can tell you this: they may all be new to it, but they live in the modern world; don't assume they're stupid. If you bring in a class set of 9-volt batteries plus LEDs, they will have good cause for thinking you are stupid.
Or anything else pertaining to the lord of the lightening.
A co-worker bought one of these awhile back, and I was impressed with it. Not a bad choice for a bright 12-year-old.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
make an intercom out of some telephones and basic circuitry
perhaps make two versions of one of them - one of raw components simply wired together and another of components on a circuit board
...and that's all there is to it.
I learned electronics when I was 14, not much different from 12 when you get down to it. Wanna know what hooked me the first day? Crossing a 15 Fd. capacitor with a screwdriver (Plastic handle with gloves on) with the lights off.
POPFIZZLESPARK
Took 15 minutes of hammering away with a chisel to get the screwdriver out, freshly melted to the contacts. The heat was so intense in that instant that the teachers forearms looked pretty sunburnt. As a matter of fact, many students swear they saw his skeleton light up and the one hot girl's shirt dissipate. One thing we all had in common, we were all thinking the same thing:
"I gotta try that on someone, I'M MAKING A TAZER!"
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
I remember building a frequency generator with caps resistors and a 555/556 chip. Ah, the fond memories...
;)
But I think these days programming and electronics have collided in a big way. Gone are the days of analog(ue).
Perhaps make a fixed board with some digial inputs and outputs (with relays and power) and a programmable pic controller... and let them play with that. (some electric motors and speakers and (light) sensors.
Thus, just drop your kid off at the local radioshack and let things just happen.
..Noone has mentioned it. C'mon, this is Slashdot! Why hasn't anyone mentioned teaching the kids about logic gates?!
Get some relays and such and teach them the basics of digital logic by building electromechanical logic gates. Infact, show them just the basics or how the relay works, etc. and try to get them to think about how to make it do what it needs to do. They're kids, they've got imagination out the wazoo, they can think of lots of neat things. And it gets them interested in how computers work, rather than just playing video games on the things.
You know, though I was interested in electronics at a young age (playing Robot Odyssey and having the various 20-in-1, 100-in-1 etc Radio Shack Electronics kits) perhaps one of the best approaches I have seen for teaching digital electronics was this one (previous Slashdot article):
4 24 1&tid=137
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/25/144
Unless of course unless you want to use MAME with Robot Odyssey. As a side note, I think a game like that would be perfect if the graphics were updated to mesh with the current generations expectations.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
All I can suggest is, as a kid my Dad bought me something like "101 electronic experiments" from radio shack circa early 80's (a quick google and I can't find anything, perhaps I have the name wrong?) It was a wooden box frame with a breadboard surface that had various marked connections. You could connect power and the crystal and tuner and amp and make a radio! Although I was by no means a rich kid, I also had a "101 physics experiments" kit that included a little solar cell. Those kits were awesome! I was a lucky kid.
Some excellent projects, every one. I also never had a solenoid, but I'm sure I'd have loved one.
A friend of mine runs a workshop called LiveWires which is basically doing what you're talking about. It's a Christian group, but if you subtract the religion then you'll probably have something useful. At least it's worth dropping them an email to ask questions.
LiveWires link
Grab.
It is the base of your spine. Check out any picture of a skeleton's back for illustrative purposes. It looks like a vestigial tail to me. And yes, this is offtopic as all hell.
Duncan wrote a couple of books - Adventures with Electronics and Adventures with Microelectronics.
Both offer a great opportunity to build up a basic knowledge of electronics on a step by step basis using readily available components and interesting, structured projects.
Some of the projects are suitable for combining with simple robotics - for example lego mindstorms - for additional interest.
ProfP
Or anything else with blinking LEDs ;-)
Back in school I took an "electronics" course that were really more of a "learn how to solder" course. A shop here in Denmark have a fairly large selection of pre-made kits that included the PCB and all the components needed. While these kits did little to teach us anything about how the components and systems work they did serve as a sort of basis for getting something assembled - far better than if it had been a purely theoretical course.
Some of the kits we used were:
- (astable) multivibrators
- simple random things (like a dice or "roulette" game with N LEDs that cycle and slowly come to a halt)
- electronic keypad/lock system
- a simple radio
- a mini-keyboard using a tone generator and some simple system for selecting which tone was made when each "key" was pressed
However, I really would have liked it if our teacher had taught us more than the basic things. He did at some point mention Ohm's law, but he never really did more than compare an electrical circuit with waterpipes and a resistor was a very thin pipe. Not really helpful.
For some of the basic stuff you might want to have some bread boards and loose components as this will make it fast and easy to assemple simple circuits. At this age my guess is that even connecting a resistor and a LED will be a challenge and it would be distracting to them, imo, if they first had to un-solder everything when they'd made a mistake.
Good luck with it!
It's 19:11:42. Do You Know Where Your Meat Body Is?
Concensus so far points to keeping things visible and audible. To that end, I recommend a large, open-frame relay (12vdc). With it you can demonstrate electromagnetics, switching principles, and closed loop sensor systems (e.g. burglar alarm). You caan use the relay switching to energize lights/LEDs, bells/buzzers/sirens, etc. Get ahold of an old speaker you can dissect to show how the same electromagnetic properties of the relay reproduce sound by connecting the free-floating coil to a diaphragm. The oscilloscope is a great idea--highly visible and an added "science fiction" quality kids can connect with. The neat thing about all of this is that all is visible and easily understood.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Make a fuse tester. Very easy and children can also decorate the case.
Found this old book at the library:
Electronic Projects for Musicians by Craig Anderton,
which has some very basic looking projects like simple amplifiers, guitar fuzz boxes, ring modulator and such. Looked suitable for beginners (which is why I'm reading it, of course). It's 24 years old, though, but maybe you'll find something similar from this decade.
Kids love making noise, right?
This will give him a well-developed sense of Right and Wrong, Truth, Justice and the American Way(TM).
He'll grow up a God-fearing, Republican, join the Army or Police and will avoid all deviancy for the rest of his life.
Stick Men
At my old school, we had an amazing teacher called Mr. Swinson. He taught woodwork and metalwork to 9 to 12 year olds.
On the electronics front, we built a robot that would follow a white line painted on the ground (by coupling two light sensitive cells to circuits that controlled the opposite motors), and a working (if a bit squealy) electronic organ.
Aside from electronics, he had children working with blow torches and lathes, constructing working steam engines that trundled along the floor from raw materials - pistons, cylinders, the boiler - everything. The only teacher to have to run extra classes after school due to demand, and not one accident worth mentioning in all that time.
He was a superb guy all round, and I've never forgotten how exciting his classes were.
all but the last are a joke.
I bought this kit for my son. He spends hours working on the provided example circuits and trying to improve them on his own. Everything just snaps together. Great Stuff. They even have a deluxe kit with computer interface. http://www.elenco.com/snapcircuits.html/
all kinds of little projects, some electronic, some otherwise. My son(13) is doing the Gauss Rifle. So as not to freak out the teacher, we're calling it a 'Linear Accelerator', instead of a railgun.
The Boy Electrician is the best place to start. Published in 1940, so the tubes are a little hard to find, but most of the projects don't use tubes. Everything is easy yet informative, and the book is aimed at boys so it is easy and fun to read. Recommended, even for adults.
P.S. That site has several other books that you will find interesting, but this is the best.
Assuming it spans multiple sessions (or maybe even if it doesn't), you'll want lots of stages to build up to. This may also be useful if you're unsure of how long things will take, as you may only be able to get to 5 stages, when you planned 7, but you don't have to tell the kids that.
I'd also advise against using soldering irons, unless you had a high number of adults to supervise the kids, or you're just asking for lots of kids with second degree burns. It's probably not worth teaching wire wrapping, but if you can afford breadboards, or can have some sort of board made that you can screw down to, you should be fine.
Here are a few ideas of things that build on each other --
- simple closed circuit, light an LED
- add a momentary contact switch, so they can make the light turn on when pushed
- modify the circuit so the light turns off when the button is pressed
- add a sensor so the sensor triggers the LED lighting up
- build a second system, to trigger the first one (maybe use IR LED, and an IR sensor?)
- add a 555 or similar to make it blink.
- change to pots so you can vary the blinking speed
you can also teach them how to read circuit diagrams as you go, and have them follow along in the pictures, and maybe give them the instructions and parts to do the other projects if you run out of time.I'd probably run it as teams of 2-3 kids, if the group was too large, there was a low adult/child ratio, or there was especially short time.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The Beakman electric motor is an awsome experiment.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
serious never built a radio or other lectronic ... :) *? magnets RULEZ!
stuff
but what still facinates me to this very day is
magnetism. i find it much "cooler" then electronics,
and i'm assuming that it is way under thought in
school. magnetism comes before electricity and
surely before electronics. maybe it is this lack
fascination for magnetism, that we still burn
coal, oil and gasolin for electricity generation
instead of fusing atoms together
Teach them about digital circuits (or gates, flip flops, the whole)
Teach them how to program a simple microcontroler (like the PIC 16F84 or the 89S51)
It's pretty simple and very fun.
Then you can build "sophisticates stuff" like a IR remote control, a simple calculator, stuff like that...
how long until
I really do hope that you aren't planning on letting them bring these home then. I have enough problems when the younger family members get noisy presents from their grandparents and insist on playing with them for the next 10 hours. Use in the halls is guaranteed to drive teachers nuts too
Noisy projects may be more interesting to the kids, but they can sure as heck be annoying to everyone esle.
Can't Tesla coils be a bit dangerous? I work in schools and while I could see older High School students using these, even some of them aren't mature enough. 12-year-olds would be more dangerous, though there are possibilities:
Today students, we will demonstrate this giant Tesla coil which was built during the previous semester...
Now for everybody who got an "F" in effort in the previous semester, please place these metal chains around your neck and stand near the coil here...
I am glad all of my early electronic playing was on vaccum tube gear -- I learned (painfully) at an early age to keep in mind that the B-plus supply is ten kinds of no fun.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
...we made batteries!!! It's basic, but it's fun and it's cool:
:)
Materials:
1. Bleach
2. Baking Soda
3. Copper stranded wire
4. Aluminium Foil
5. Wax Paper or other nonconductive surface that will survive immersion in bleach
5. Glass container or old canning/jelly jar
6. LEDs or old fashioned screw in flashlight bulb with fixture (can you even find those anymore?)
7. Alligator clips
Instructions:
1. Take the foil and form a cup with a tail (sort of like a laddle) so that 1/3 of the bottom of the glass container is lined with foil and the the tail hangs over the outside edge of the glass.
2. Place a piece of wax paper that is cut to line the foil into the foil cup.
3. Strip the copper stranded wire and unstrand a good amount in order to form a ball of copper that will fill the wax paper lined foil cup without any of the copper touching the foil.
4. Strip the other end of the copper wire and attach an alligator clip to it.
5. Tie on another piece of copper wire to the foil's tail and attach an alligator clip to the other end as well.
6. Connect the alligator clips to your flashlight bulb or LED. (I think the copper ball end is the positive (+) end. I can't remember for sure.)
7. Pour in enough bleach to submerse the ball of copper and the foil.
8. Your light source should light up. Congrats you've made a battery.
9. You can add baking soda to the bleach and the light should brighten for a bit.
It's also a lesson in chemistry. AND... in the event of a "terra" attack, you now know how to make batteries to power your flashlight in complete "Macguyver" style.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I liked building "radios" first a simple AM reciever, then an AM transmitter, that turned into a "CB". Then I played with Led transmitter/receiver projects with some optical fun to make directional sorta "spy" radios. None had a range of over 20 ft. so I think the FCC was OK with them?
Trouble, a mistake or fun, your choice
In my high school, we had a class in electricity. The part that excited the students the most was launching iron cores out of coils, and making big sparks with capacitors.
Of course, this was completely ignoring what the teacher was teaching, but oh well!
My advice is to get the students to build a big project (bad-ass nailgun that's too big to carry/get stolen/aim) out of many smaller projects (individual coils with light-activated sensors).
Then move on to linear induction motors, rail guns, can crushers, levitating induction furnaces, etc.
If they're not permanently hooked on electronics and tech, I'll give you double your money back!
A simple project that I remember fondly from my electronics class at high school was a fun little LED flasher project using a LM3909 LED flasher IC, a LED, a capacitor and a AA battery.
:)
An example circuit is on this page.
Mount it in a matchbox, and you have your first electronics project! I think I still have that thing 20 years later.
I could solder really well when I was 12, because I got into electronics when I was about 6 or 7, and had been soldering for years. All it takes is practice...
But first, let's expose the kids to a dictionary, so they know it's spelled 'laser' and 'lens'. Thank you.
Lego Dacta is not cheap, but really gets kids involved. I usually follow it up with Floppy the robot, a simple bot built with a 3.5" floppy drive. Competitions are really addictive, I either invent one for the group like climbing to the top of a ramp or navigating a maze. Destructive competitions tend to leave out the girls..... To get them really hooked, try the Boston University Design competition (http://www.bu.edu/eng/design/rules, or the University of Vermont DesignTASC(http://www.emba.uvm.edu/TASC/2004/index .htm)