Hello I am Jared. welcome to fun science demos. Let me introduce you to some of my
friends. I have a jar of fireflies, but they are not real fireflies. I actually
use science to create these fireflies, and hidden behind this picture is some
electricity and a pathway for that electricity to follow, and scientists
call that circuits. that is the big idea for today. Let us take a look at
how all of this works. First let us look at our electricity. our electricity comes
from these flat batteries. Now let us look at our circuits, or the pathway that the
electricity follows. You can see we do not have any wires. we are actually using flat
metal tape to form our pathways, and it looks a little complicated to begin with,
but we are going to break it down and make it very simple for you to follow.
So, let us take a little time to explain this circuit. Our battery goes right here
and folding the corner of the paper is our switch, and if you follow our circuit
we have one light, two lights, three lights, and four lights in our circuit.
So, how do I get from this a blank sheet of paper to this our finished circuit? well, I am
going to need a couple of things. I am going to need a piece of paper. I am going
to need a pencil, I am going to need a flat battery. I am going to need a roll of metal
tape that you can get pretty much at any hardware store. I am also going to need
these special LED lights that we have linked to in the video description, so
you know where you can get your own set of LED lights. So, to start I need to take
my metal tape and cut it into strips. I am going to cut off a long section, and now I
just need to cut this down into strips. so I have my metal tape cut into strips,
and now I need to actually draw the circuit with a pencil, and we are going to
zoom in so you can see more closely how we do this. Alright, so I am going to start by
picking a corner to be my switch. I am just going to fold the corner down and
that is going be my switch. this is where the battery is going to sit, so I am going
to draw one battery circle here and the top part of the battery is
going to touch that. this will be my positive side, this will be my negative
side, because remember, every battery has two sides - a positive
and a negative side. so my battery will sit there. Now I need to draw the pathway.
so I am going to come down, come over, come up, come over, and I could really draw any
path I wanted to. Now I am going to take the negative path. I am going to come over, down,
over, up, and here is where I want to make sure I go right next to the other path I
drew because we are going to be making what scientists call a parallel circuit.
and our pathways are going to run parallel to each other right here, and now my
lights will probably go somewhere in there. So, now I just need to lay down my
tape to follow my pathway. so to get the little strip started, I like to just bend
the corner back back and forth, and it should pull right apart. one side is
sticky, so I am not going to pull all the backing off. I want to overlap the spot where
my battery is going, and now just run the pathway down.
When I get to a corner what I want to do is do something called cornering, so if
my pathway goes this way I am going to Bend and angle my tape the opposite direction,
fold it back on itself, and in another video we actually show you more
detailed ways of doing this corner. Open it up a little bit, use my pencil if I
need to, come to another corner,
come to another corner,
cut off the extra,
and there is one path.
[Music]
So, we laid down our circuit, now we need to test to see if the pathway actually
works. so, put my battery into place, the negative side down, the positive side...
there is my switch. I am going to hold the light bulb, hopefully so you can see it,
so it can touch the pathways, and join the pathways, and my light bulb lights up
and we have success. The one important thing to remember is that just like this
battery has two sides, a positive and a negative side, our light bulb has two
wires coming out of it, and one of the wires is positive, the other wire is
negative. The longer wire - if I pinch them together - you can see this wire is longer.
the longer wire is going to be our positive wire, and that is going to be our
negative one. Now I am ready to attach my lights, and to do that I am just going to use
a pencil to poke through my paper wherever I want the light bulb to go.
Now when I put the light bulb in I have to remember that the positive wire on the
light bulb has to come into contact with a positive leg of my circuit. Push the
light bulb through the paper, bend my wires down, and now I just want to make
sure that I attach it. so, here I have one wire touching the positive leg of my
circuit, and here is the negative wire. To attach it I am just going to use a little
piece of our metal tape,
and then the other side. it is okay if the light bulb pops up back through, and now
I am going to use my pencil just to make sure the tape comes in contact with the
wire. Now let us check to see if it works. Alright, so we have attached our first
light bulb into our circuit. now let us test it to see if it works. Put my switch
on, hold it up, and it looks like our light bulb works. so we put the rest of
our lights in, and you will notice they are not all lighting up, so we have to figure
out what is going on. Let us flip it over and see if we can figure out how to
troubleshoot, and make this thing work. so you will notice when I just start tracing
and pressing on my circuit, the lights seem to flicker. Well, that is because I am
missing the contact in some of these spots, and I may need to go back over some of
this run with more metal tape to see if that could actually fix our problem.
So, we have got some of our light bulbs working as you can see it is all a part
of science, and whether it works or does not work, learning is a lot of fun
when you get to do things with your hands. If you want to learn more about
electricity and circuits check out our link in the video description.
Science is so cool.
Thanks for watching!