Additional challenges for Circuit Bender badge

[Doresa]

Is it possible to add challenges for the Circuit Bender badge? I am putting together a basic electronics course and thought it would be nice to have my son put in for challenges as he completes components for the book that is targeted to DIY age participants and was surprised that many of the activities from the book and many other circuitry based books for kids didn't have DIY associated categories. 

Some particular ones that struct me that are pretty universal for kid based circuit designs were:

Mixing Colors using an RGB LED

Creating a Water Sensor

Creating an Alarm

Making a light automatically turn on when it gets dark

Making Pressure Sensitive circuits

Making a Game (some common ones for kids are random number generators, heads or tails/coin flip, and infrared targets

Also, some fundamentals for circuits including:

Drawing and labeling a circuit

Using a multimeter

Calculating the value of a resistor/using ohms values

It just seems like this is such a good category for kids to be able to show measured progress and the category could really be fleshed out just a little more so that kids are showing their circuits and showing other DIYers that once they learn the fundamentals they can do a lot of things. This is just such a good category that could encourage kids to really do some interesting things with circuits. Many of these can be done on Breadboards as well as Snap Circuits - so younger and older kids could both work the category a bit more fully.

Just a thought!

[Becky Margraf]

Hi Doresa,

These are great ideas! Circuit Bender is overdue for an update, so this is an excellent list to jumpstart that process. If you have any more ideas, you can post them here or email them to me directly at be...@diy.org. :)

Thank you very much! 

Becky