My daughter had some homework to do this weekend, she needed to create a poster about Electrical Energy. When we were thinking about what she could do for the Illustration section, we thought maybe we could have an actual circuit to illustrate.
It happened to also be a sleep-over night, so her good friend Kate who had never soldered anything before got into the action and they got a little circuit running and had lots of fun doing it.
The hardest part was trying to figure out how to hook up the batteries on the poster. I figured coin cell batteries would be light and easy to attach, but getting a good connection while also trying to show all the parts for the illustration was a little tricky.
I made the girls leave the room on my first attempt to solder directly to the batteries. I wasn’t sure what might happen if the batteries were heated up too much, turned out not to be an issue because the solder wouldn’t really stick. We ended up using some ‘wire glue’ and hot glued it after it dried for good measure.
Other than that, it was relatively straight forward. It worked first try, the LED flickered a little when you were holding it so I cleaned up a couple of the solder joints but the girls did most of the work.
The girls had fun. Not a stereotypical “Girly Sleepover” activity, but maybe it should be.