Squishy Circuits

Interesting course materials from University of St. Thomas in Minnesota:

http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/index.htm

Doesn’t present a fully accurate model of circuit building, since it appears that even the conductive dough has some resistance, so for example, they can connect an LED directly to a battery pack through the dough without blowing the LED, but still seems like a cool way to combine the fun of play-doh and teaching the basics of circuit building.

And it’s a lot less fiddly than trying to teach young kids to use a breadboard. :slight_smile:

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I’ve taught this a few times at our local science center. It’s a lot of fun. However, I’ll warn you that making a big batch of the dough is a very time consuming job. Give yourself 2-3 nights of prep time… To make it easier to give the info out to others, I actually bought the domain name, squishycircuits.info, that is just a CNAME for the St. Thomas URL :wink:

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@ ianlee74 - I should have guessed that you’d have had your hands in this…literally. :whistle:

My kids love it when I make up a batch and they get to play.

I haven’t quite figured out the “insulator” dough yet, though. The stuff I’ve made is so sticky and icky that we don’t even bother using it in the workshops. If anyone knows a better recipe, I’m definitely interested.