Teaching Electrical Engineering Concepts With Squishy Circuits

Did you play with an electronics kit when you were a kid? If so, what age did you start? When I was about 10, my parents bought me an Elenco Electronic Playground kit for Christmas. I had a lot of fun learning about resistors, capacitors, transistors, and other components. I have fond memories of building a small AM transmitter and tapping out Morse code messages.

Classic electronics kits with spring-wire connectors, like the Electronic Playground, are generally recommended for children ages 10 and older. Today, Snap Circuits kits are gaining in popularity. These kits rely on simple button-snap connectors, and are suitable for children ages 8 and older. But what about younger kids? Is it possible to teach electrical engineering concepts to 5 year olds?

AnnMarie Thomas, an engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, thinks so. With the help of student Sam Johnson, she developed squishy circuits. Thomas' daughters, Sage (age 6) and Grace (age 4), performed a demonstration of squishy circuits at the World Maker Faire in New York City on Sept. 20.

What are squishy circuits? Many parents have had the experience of making homemade Play-Doh with their kids. It's easy to do, uses ingredients that are commonly found around the house, and kids enjoy playing with it. Thomas and her student came up with a recipe for a conductive Play-Doh. Regular Play-Doh is already conductive, but their version is about twice as conductive as the commercial version. They also developed an insulating dough. The insulating dough, which contains sugar, has a resistivity more than 200 times higher than that of the conductive dough, which contains salt. With these two types of dough, a battery pack, and a variety of LEDs and assorted other components (for example, pushbuttons, buzzers, and small motors), kids can sculpt a wide variety of circuits.

Squishy circuits are a fun way to introduce young kids to electrical engineering concepts. Kids love sculpting things out of play dough, and the ability to incorporate features like motors and LEDs makes it even more exciting. At the same time, they can learn about concepts like electrical resistance, series and parallel circuits, and Ohm's Law in an intuitive way, at a much earlier age than they normally would. The dough is safe, cheap, and easy to prepare. Components for use in squishy circuits are easy to come by; if you don't want to make a trip to Radio Shack or another electronics retailer, you can purchase a pre-packaged components kit online from the Squishy Circuits Store (a project of Matthew Schmidtbauer, one of Thomas' former students).

In 2011, Thomas gave a four-minute TED Talk about squishy circuits. Since then, they have been incorporated into many K-12 educational programs. A Canadian educator who gave a squishy circuits demonstration for a local Brownie troop remarked, "I didn't anticipate that by the end of the evening, 20 kids would be jumping up and down with excitement, proclaiming the incredible coolness of building electronics, refusing to be torn from their creations until they could be demonstrated to volunteers and parents, and vowing to go home and take apart their vacuum cleaners."

Thomas is the director of the University of St. Thomas's Playful Learning Lab, which focuses on ways to combine play and STEM education. She is also the associate director of the university's Center for Engineering Education, which prepares current and future engineering educators to teach at the pre-school, elementary, middle, and high school levels. Her new book, titled "Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation," was released on Sept. 20 by Maker Media.

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