Everyone loves lights - I mean come on, they spruce up everything! What’s even more fascinating is getting a bulb to light up using minimal materials, especially when you try to stay very far away from that mysterious world. In my digital learning course, we learned how to create circuits using simple LED lights, two gauges of copper wire, and a battery. We began by only using those materials, with little instruction.
Resources on how to create a circuit were given to us, but I’m stubborn and wanted to figure it out on my own. I tested the LEDs by touching them directly to the battery. Sweet, they all worked! Next, I chose the thicker gauge copper wire, attached the LED to the wire, and touched both ends to the battery. Nothing happened; I found I was doing something wrong. Through experimentation, I realized that the LED had to be attached to both copper wires - the thicker gauge touches the negative side of the battery while the thinner gauge touches the positive. Once I figured that out, I really felt like an engineer of some sorts.
I thought to myself, “If I feel this empowered, imagine how accomplished younger children would feel!”I was ready to take on another challenge - more lights! I started to add on additional lights, and before I knew it, none of my lights would lights up anymore. I really could not figure out why, which gave me a feeling of frustration. After a little trial and error, I went to look at those resources that were provided for us. My professor then decided to give us a brief lesson on short circuiting. He explained the two copper wires could not touch. When they touched, it acted like a shortcut for the flow of electricity; instead of going through the light, the flow of electricity would hop over the wires, neglecting the LED. This quickly resolved my problem and I was able to get up to four LEDs to light up!
This simple activity over the flow of electricity gave me great ideas for future projects, and we actually expanded on this lesson in class. As a class, we constructed a collaborative Cardboard City by creating our own individual “thing” - this could include buildings, sidewalks, trees, mailboxes, the list can go on forever! I decided I wanted to make a modern looking cafe, mostly because the cardboard pieces I chose were so angular. I was able to put lights into my structure, and made sure the wires and battery were hidden. Although I was proud of my little cafe, I was EXTREMELY proud of our final product. It was amazing to see the different things people decided to construct; It really did look like a true city because everything was so individualized - obviously not made by the same hand.
A couple weeks after our collaborative activity, my professor introduced paper circuits. Instead of using copper wire, we would now use copper tape, making our structure 2D. We were provided templates that helped us understand how a structure would work on a piece of paper. I decided to put my stubbornness aside and practice with the template, which made it much easier to quickly lay down my personalized structure later. The muscle memory came in handy. The ideas that came from this were endless - we could incorporate it into our Copy, Paste, Hack prints, make birthday cards, you name it! I found copper tape to be a much neater way to create a circuit because you could easily hide the tape, where in some cases hiding copper wire might be tricky.
