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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.
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 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
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?
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.
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
..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.
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.
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?
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.