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What you need to know before trying the "Make Electricity" Experiments Make electricity experiments is for students in grades 5th and up. Students need to have a good understanding of how electricity works before trying to produce it. Students must also have the basic skills and abilities of a normal person. They must be able to use tools such as knife, scissors, screw driver. This project is not recommended for people with physical or mental disabilities. If you have the necessary skills, but lack the basic knowledge of electricity and conductivity, please read this page and try the suggested experiments. These are pre-requisite for the make electricity projects. Light up a light bulb You must be able to light up a small light bulb (included in your kit) with a regular 1.5-volt battery (Any size battery will work fine. The most common sizes are AA, C or D size). Try this:
*How can I do that? If you are using connection wires with alligator clips on both ends, you can simply push the head of the alligator to open the jaws and hold the contact screw of the light bulb between the jaws. Alligator clips provides a relatively secure and fast temporary connection for your experiments. If you are using regular insulated wire, you must first remove some insulation from the ends of the wire for your contacts. Then loosen the screws on the base and place the bare end of the wire under the screw and tighten the screw. After you successfully light up a light bulb using a battery, then you can proceed to the next step and test your battery using a voltmeter. Try This:
If you can successfully read the voltage of a battery, then you can go to the next step and make your first fruit battery. The most important step after making a fruit battery is measuring the voltage. Do I need to understand
Voltage and Current before trying the Make Electricity project? In your kit you will have two different types of light. One is an incandescent light bulb with a screw base. This type of light require high current. The other is an LED (Light Emitting Diode) that requires high voltage. If you don't know about current and voltage, read this: Voltage and Current Part of the reason why electricity seems so mystifying is because you can't see it. But such things as voltage, current, etc can be explained by imagining electricity in cables as if it was water flowing in a pipe. VOLTAGE is the "pressure of electricity", and CURRENT is the flow-rate. If you are using batteries as the source of electricity, then you must know that usually larger cells provide higher current. For example alkaline batteries in sizes AA, C and D have the same voltage, but C cells can provide higher current than AA cells. D cells can provide higher current than C cells.
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