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This week we did the wire maze activity. First though, we went over the gumdrop towers from the last week, and talked about how triangles made for a much sturdier structure than squares. To start out discussion of electricity, I used the analogy of a circular hose with water in it to compare to a wire with current running through it. We compared voltage to a water pump, and a light bulb to a propellor in the hose that spun only when the water was flowing. We said that there must be a complete 'circuit' for 'current' to flow. If the hose kinked, then no current could flow--then we linked in insulators (kinks) and conductors (open hose). We showed all of this on the whiteboard. After giving the kids the materials we realized that they still didn't really understand what was going on, so we showed them again, and went around and helped them connect the circuits. Some of them seemed confused about the 'loop' of wire that was used to move along the maze, relative to the loop that the current needs to travel through. It was kind of a rush towards the end to get everyone to have a working maze, because they didn't catch on as quickly as we had expected. There were also some problems with the connections, etc. especially since small incandescent bulbs weren't available at the time so we had to wire together an LED and a resistor beforehand in place of the bulb. In general though, they had fun and I think that they learned a bit about the way that electricity works/flows. Almost all of them got to try out their mazes too.
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