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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?"
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.
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?
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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).
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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.
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.
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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
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?
..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.
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!
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I'm not so sure about some of the projects in the parent - in my experience of teaching kids the best way to teach them is to engauge their enthusiasm. To do that you need high-impact, exciting projects that also demonstrate the principles behind them.
What's interesting about a rheostat? Or a battery in a beaker? Sure, I find the idea of building a battery interesting, but that's because I (A-level Chemistry) know and understand the principles behind it, and seeing them in action is what makes it fun. Anything that's fun because of an appreciation of the theory behind it is doomed, because you need to already know it before it becomes fun to learn.
I've always found the way to teach kids is to go for something that's interesting/fun/cool-looking up-front (steady-hand game, safe-with-buzzer, etc), and once they're interested, explain how they work. Try demoing one at the beginning of the class, let them play with it, then explain how it works while they're building their own.
It's very important to give a good grounding in the basics, but you can do that in a fun way, slipping in bits of theoretical knowledge while they're blinded by flashing lights and cool noises.
I suppose it depends if your priority is to teach them The Basics, or give them an interest that may extend outside the classroom... :-\
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