I run this activity every Sunday as a volunteer at the Boston Museum of Science. We used to make our own dough, but this became pretty labor intensive, and we found that regular Play-doh has only a slightly higher amount of resistance than the homemade dough, and is actually cheaper when you buy Play-doh in bulk (the dough recipe here calls for a lot of cream of tartar, which gets costly).
I've done a lot of development on additional components for this (basically all in my free time, with my money. I bring them into the Museum and just train other people on them, and they get incorporated into the Squisy Circuits kit) -- logic gates, on/off switches, blinky components, resistors, etc. The sky's really the limit! When the Museum started doing it, people got really bored easily -- I'd hear from staff and volunteers that it was a really limited activity and hard to really keep kids engaged with it. I found out that the people running it didn't exactly know a lot about circuits themselves, so all it took was a little training, experimenting, and coming up with activity ideas for it to really take off!
In addition, it's one of the few activities we have there where I'm secretly teaching the adults more than the children. A lot of adults are too embarrassed to admit they have no idea how electricity works, so I just pretend their three year old is really really interested in the difference between parallel and series circuits -- actually in the hopes that the adults are the ones absorbing it, and can teach their three year old in a few years ;)
Just all-around one of my favorite activities! My boyfriend gets bored from listening to me talk about Squishy Circuits constantly, so I'm really glad to see this show up on HN, and get other people interested in it!
Agreed! But think about it also from the perspective of someone who lives in a Third World country who wants to experiment with electronics, but who can't get access to electronic parts.
I'm not sure how you could create a transistor with it however.
I do know that you can create a diode out of a Razor Blade heated to a high temperature via a gas flame such that carbon deposits form on its outside, and a sharpened pencil, where a wire attaches to the carbon on the pencil, then you move the pencil around to find a spot on the razor blade where it works -- this was the operating mechanism in early Crystal Radio sets.
But if only we could create a transistor easily...
Wow! This could possibly be used replacement for breadboard+wires for trying out circuits i.e. almost like you can create PCB on a plastic circuit by using this instead of copper.
I've done a lot of development on additional components for this (basically all in my free time, with my money. I bring them into the Museum and just train other people on them, and they get incorporated into the Squisy Circuits kit) -- logic gates, on/off switches, blinky components, resistors, etc. The sky's really the limit! When the Museum started doing it, people got really bored easily -- I'd hear from staff and volunteers that it was a really limited activity and hard to really keep kids engaged with it. I found out that the people running it didn't exactly know a lot about circuits themselves, so all it took was a little training, experimenting, and coming up with activity ideas for it to really take off!
In addition, it's one of the few activities we have there where I'm secretly teaching the adults more than the children. A lot of adults are too embarrassed to admit they have no idea how electricity works, so I just pretend their three year old is really really interested in the difference between parallel and series circuits -- actually in the hopes that the adults are the ones absorbing it, and can teach their three year old in a few years ;)
Just all-around one of my favorite activities! My boyfriend gets bored from listening to me talk about Squishy Circuits constantly, so I'm really glad to see this show up on HN, and get other people interested in it!