Great Idea: Squishy Circuit

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              One of the fondest memories of my childhood was playing around with that squishy, brightly-colored clay that most people know of as Playdough; however, I was missing out, because I was using the store bought kind.  It wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered that you can actually make play dough at home with common household ingredients like flour and salt; you can even color them with food coloring. Needless to say I was disappointed that I hadn’t discovered this sooner. But, what I’ve just discovered is that I’m not the only one who discovered something new about play dough far beyond their childhood years.

            
               AnnMarie Thomas is an engineer, a teacher at the University of St. Thomas, and a huge believer in the value of hands-on learning. One day, she tried to teach her own daughter about circuitry and electricity, and discovered how difficult and frustrating it was for her daughter to maneuver and connect little wires and circuit boards with her tiny hands. Her daughter wasn’t learning anything and if anything it was making her daughter hate learning about electricity.  So AnnMarie and one of her students, Sam, came up with a solution: squishy circuits.

            
              A lot of us probably don’t know this (I know I didn’t), but play dough is actually conductive to electricity! Especially, it turns out, the homemade kind you make with salt and flour from your kitchen. This homemade play dough is even more conductive to electricity than the store bought kind, and can be used to demonstrate all sorts of properties about electricity. In addition, a second recipe of homemade play dough that uses sugar instead of salt, is much less conductive to electricity, and helps make the play dough circuits even more realistic and complex.

            
            Using these two types of homemade play dough, AnnMarie and her daughter lit up lights, powered propellers, and learned a lot about the properties of electricity. AnnMarie even took the idea back to her engineering lab at her university and had her students experiment with it there. This is a cute, simple, fun, and clever idea, and I bet it could help a lot of young kids get excited about science if more kids knew about it.